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Q&A: Tess Gerritsen on her new book ‘The Spy Coast’
The "Rizzoli & Isles" author is already working on the follow-up to her new Maine-set pager-turner.
Step aside, Miss Marple. Tess Gerritsen is redefining what it means to be a woman of a certain age solving a mystery.
My first thought reading Tess Gerritsen’s new Maine-set thriller, “The Spy Coast”: It’s like someone turned the “The Thursday Murder Club” on its head. Richard Osman’s charming bestselling series centers on a small club of adorable retirees in England solving murders, largely based on their love of mystery books, with just one real ex-spy, Elizabeth, among them.
Here, Gerritsen delivers a dark spy-thriller featuring a small club of retirees in New England setting out to solve a murder, all based on their savvy expertise as ex-spies. If the Thursday Murder Club was made up entirely of Elizabeths, you’d have the Martini Club.
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“I finally got to write about a character who’s my age, who’s like me, whose eyes I can see through,” Gerritsen, 70, told me recently. “It turned into more of a spy novel, but I wanted to explore this past tragedy in her life, and how we end up in our 60s and 70s different from when we were in our 30s.”
Billed as the first installment of a Martini Club series, “The Spy Coast” has all the hallmarks of a classic spy thriller — murder, intrigue, and overseas adventure. It’s also classic Gerritsen: a well-plotted page-turner.
I loved that our main characters are strong women, from teens to retirees. Our protagonist, retiree Maggie Bird, is 60 and tough as nails. After an adventurous life — and a mission gone wrong— in the CIA, Maggie retires to the idyll of Purity, Maine. She’s now a chicken farmer, who gives eggs to her neighbor: former MIT professor and Boston resident Luther Yount. Luther and his granddaughter now sell the eggs at farmers’ markets.
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It’s a quiet life out of a Maine postcard until a body is dropped in Maggie’s driveway. A warning? Or a present, like a cat leaving a mouse in the doorway?
Enter the Martini Club: Maggie’s neighbors and former spies who help uncover the truth about who may be trying to kill her, and why. Meanwhile, Purity’s acting police chief, Jo Thibodeau’s hackles go up when she questions the Club. She starts sniffing around their motives and investigation. It’s not Midcoast Maine — it’s Spy Coast, Maine.
I called the Camden, Maine resident and “Rizzoli & Isles” author to talk strong women, TV adaptations, whiskey, and her fantasy of writing a dystopian YA under a secret pen name.
Some responses have been edited for length or clarity.
Boston.com: This was such a fun read. And it ends on something of a cliffhanger. It looks like the Martini Club is going to be a series?
Gerritsen: I’m working on the second book now. I have an idea for the third book. But I need to take a break. I’m tired. I wrote [the first] with the idea that this would be a one-off. Then Amazon Studios bought it for television development. So I decided to write a second book. I’m finishing it up now.
You have a running commentary throughout on women aging and feeling invisible. For example, When Maggie goes to Bangkok, she says, of her age: “Once I had to don a disguise to disappear; now it takes no effort at all, because I really am invisible.”
I couldn’t have written this book if I were 40. You have to go through it in your own life. You have to get to the age where, yeah, the bones are starting to ache a little. Maybe you aren’t as fast at running as you used to be. But you feel like your brain is still working at full speed. That’s how I imagine these people. They’re all still very skillful. Physically, they just aren’t up to where they were at age 20. They have to learn to work around that. It’s that workaround that was interesting to me.
How did Maggie come to you?
I just heard her voice. She said, “I’m not the woman I used to be.” I thought, “Well, we’re all kind of like that.” What kind of woman did you used to be? The story was really about who she is and how she came to this point in her life and what went wrong.
How did you research for details of her life as a spy?
I go straight to memoirs because people tell the truth — or I hope they tell the truth — in their memoirs. They let loose with little details that they might not tell you [face-to-face.] I think I read five memoirs, and then, of course, books about tradecraft.
I love that, no matter what their age, all your main characters here are strong women.
Well, Maine is an interesting state in that it’s a state of strong women. I mean, Margaret Chase Smith — it’s always been a state where women seem to take the lead. So it felt very natural to have Jo Thibodeau be a woman.
You’ve had other adaptations, including “Rizzoli & Isles.” What’s it like seeing your books on screen?
You know, I’ve learned to surrender any sense of ownership. Once you give it to Hollywood, you have no idea what they’re gonna do. They can make it better or they can make it worse. You just have to back away and say, well, at least it sells books.
Did you like the “Rizzoli & Isles” adaptation?
It was really different. I think it was a shock for me at first to find that Rizzoli was no longer a homely woman, but now she’s beautiful. How much more glamorous it is.
You’re also a filmmaker with your son Josh.
Yeah, we made two films. One was a horror film, “Island Zero” (2018) The second was a documentary, “Magnificent Beast” (2022) about a topic very few people really know the answer to. Why is pork a taboo food among religions? What’s the ancient origin [of] that taboo? We focused on archaeology, anthropology, and character of the pig.
You worked in internal medicine. You’ve said your father wanted you to go into medicine; you always loved writing.
I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was seven. I told my father and he said: You can’t make a living that way. So I went to medical school, but I always knew I was going to write, I thought, as a hobby. Even when I was a medical resident, I was writing short stories. But it was when I went on maternity leave that I had time to write my first book. After a couple of tries, I got one published and that was pretty much it. I decided: OK. I’m going to focus on this.
You started out writing romance.
I did, because I enjoyed reading romance-suspense. All my romances had murder in them so I should have known then that I was really a mystery writer.
You recently tweeted about wanting to write under a “secret pen name.”
It would probably drive my agent and editor crazy, but sometimes, after you’ve been writing for a while, people come to expect certain things. And if you don’t deliver exactly what they’re expecting, they’re disappointed in you. It just felt like it would be fun to start over again. To not write what they think you’re supposed to be writing, and do something wild. But you’d have to do it under a different name.
What would be the story you’d want to tell?
I’d like to write a story about the near future and our turning away from science. It’s a nightmarish scenario that all of a sudden, some people want us back in the Dark Ages. Burning books, denying science? That’s on the way back to the Dark Ages.
That’d be interesting. Is this something you think you would write?
Yeah, I think it would be more along the lines of the young adult story. Kind of a warning of where we could be headed if we don’t stop this movement backwards.
You tweeted that “The Bone Garden” was one of your favorites because it “felt so good to write.”
Yeah, another one of those books that nobody was expecting. That was out of my usual genre. I felt really good about that story. It didn’t sell as well because it’s not a contemporary crime novel but sometimes you just have to write what you want to write.
Would you return to your “Rizolli” series?
I have an idea, but right now, I’m focused on Maggie.
Any word on when we might see “The Spy Coast” on screen?
All I know is they’ve hired the show-runners and they’re working on the pilot. That’s all I know. It’s kind of like a black box — every so often, you get a little alert from the black box, but you don’t know what’s really happening inside.
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Lauren Daley can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1.
Book Club’s next read is “Rouge” by Mona Awad
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