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THE KEEPSAKE
By: Tess Gerritsen
Ballantine Books: New York
2009 (pb)
The press and news media wait with great anticipation
at Boston’s Pilgrim Hospital as a gurney is rolled through the lobby doors.
But this is not a high profile celebrity accident or drug overdose victim;
this is everyone’s favorite museum subject – an Egyptian mummy from the
Ptolemaic Dynasty dating from some 2,000 years in the past! Madame X, as
she has been nicknamed in the press, had recently been discovered,
apparently abandoned and forgotten, in the basement of the venerable Crispin
Museum—the cabinet of curiosities repository of antiquities and oddities
collected by many generations of the Crispin family, explorers and
archaeologists, all.
Madame X is to undergo a CT scan at Pilgrim Hospital,
demonstrating the efficacy of non-invasive procedures for exposing the
mummified remains without doing the damage inevitably resulting from the
unwrapping of the body. The CT, or computed tomography scan fires x-rays
into the mummy remains from thousands of angles, which are then processed by
a computer that generates a three-dimensional image of the internal anatomy
of the body. Witnessing the experimental process, in addition to the med
tech and the hospital’s radiologist, are the two co-investigator
archaeologists from the museum – the avuncular curator Dr. Nicholas Robinson
and the lovely young Egyptologist Josephine Pulcillo. Another invited
expert guest is Dr. Maura Isles, the Boston Medical Examiner, whose pallid
face severely cut black hair has led to her media nickname, the Queen of the
Dead.
But as Madame X’s image reaches its conclusion, an
incredible anomaly appears: a very modern bullet seems to be lodged in the
mummy’s calf, and the telltale signs of healing would indicate that the
wound was ante mortem—before death! The archaeology project quickly
becomes a medical examiner’s case for Maura Isles, and her autopsy of Madame
X reveals a very contemporary young female victim who has been embalmed
following the mummification procedures of ancient Egypt. There is a
departure, however, from those practices—the lips have been sewn shut and
within the mouth, has been deposited a token that reads, “I visited the
Pyramids, Cairo, Egypt;” on the reverse side is a cartouche for the name “Medea.”
Detective Jane Rizzoli and her partner Barry Frost of the Boston PD are
called in to initiate the investigation of this cold case, which at the very
least, is not 2,000 years old.
Rizzoli and her team scour the Crispin Museum to
ascertain whether more “lost” bodies might be stored away in its dusty nooks
and crannies. What they find is an un-catalogued tsantsa, or
shrunken head stuffed with remnants of a 26-year-old newspaper from Indio,
California. To her horror, Josephine Pulcillo realizes that the clues left
behind—first the “Medea” token and then the Indio newspaper—put her squarely
in the middle of these mysteries. Subsequent events, including a sinister
anonymous note that leads Josephine to the discovery of a “bog body” in the
trunk of her stolen car, make it obvious to Rizzoli and the Boston PD
investigators that Josephine may well be the ultimate target of a very
disturbed killer. That is until they discover that Josephine Pulcillo died
in an automobile accident 24 years earlier—their beautiful young
archaeologist has been lying to them all along!
What follows is a tense, convoluted mystery that speeds
to an incredibly dramatic denouement as Rizzoli and Maura Isles both get
drawn into the web of danger and suspense that envelopes “Josephine Pulcillo.”
Archaeology and the darkly atmospheric Crispin Museum seem to be the common
threads that link victims and killer, but will the heroines of this series
discover that link before it’s too late?
This is a fascinating thriller—not necessarily meant
for the faint of heart—that should bring enjoyment (and shivers) to any
intrepid reader on a dark and stormy night. Three Trowels for The
Keepsake.
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