The Sinner by Tess GerritsenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is somewhere mid-series (I'm sadly accessing them out of order). It's only a few days before Christmas and Dr. Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli are faced with holiday issues, Maura is alone and Jane has to deal with the results taking Gabriel Dean as her lover when they're called in after two nuns were found beaten. Sister Ursula hovers between life and death and the young novice, Camille, is dead.
To their surprise, Camille had recently given birth. Thinking that it might be the cause of the beatings, they begin to look into how a nun got pregnant and what happened to the baby (an unwanted child echoing Jane's situation). Maura is confronted with the return of Victor Banks, her ex-husband who is interested in getting back together again. He's the head of a medical charity, that has branches in India. Oddly enough Sister Ursula was a nurse on a charity mission in India.
Then another woman, darker skinned and small, turns up murdered, hands, face and feet removed. It's very possible she, too, has ties to India and Maura and Jane have to decide if this is somehow connected to the two nuns.
Overall, it's a good mystery, interesting and tragic. However, the personal life stuff with both Maura and Jane irritated me more than it interested me mostly because the topics of do I go back with my ex and do I have this child because I'm such a busy woman, while very real every day concerns, neither interest me and have been done to death especially in the way they were handled here.
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