Tess Gerritsen's Reading List

"This a modern – well, 1930s – version of Jane Eyre . In the grand tradition of Gothic novels , it features an innocent young woman and a scary house with secrets. The heroine marries a widowed Englishman and moves into his mansion, where the servants are still mourning his stunning first wife, Rebecca. Throughout the story, she feels the first wife haunt the house, and she can never quite measure up to her. And then the heroine begins to wonder: What if Rebecca was murdered? What if my husband did it? Yes, it is a little bit like [Akira Kurosawa’s film] Rashomon in that you look at this dead woman from different points of view. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers sees the late Rebecca as a queen, an object of total worship. The heroine sees her as a flawless and beautiful ideal that she can never match up to. Then you find out that, from the husband’s point of view, Rebecca was in fact a monster. The exploration of who this dead woman really was, and whether her husband might have killed her. That’s the underlying theme for a lot of good crime novels – the unknowable person. We all walk around with a public face, but we don’t really know what is underneath that mask. Crime fiction is about finding out who the real person is."

"This book was my introduction to the spy thriller . I had read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before that. But Eye of the Needle was a thriller as opposed to a spy novel. John le Carré is very cerebral. There is an intellectual puzzle of trying to figure out who the characters are. Eye of the Needle was an out-and-out chase thriller. The plot is about whether the English intelligence officer will catch “the Needle” before he completely changes the course of the Second World War. And even though you know how the war ends, Follett manages to keep up this incredible adrenaline all the way through the story because the villain is so brilliant and tenacious. First, he is ruthless. He can get out of almost any scrape. He is like the dark side of James Bond. Another thing Follett does which I found really effective is introduce a heroine who is a completely ordinary housewife with nothing going for her. She is very unhappy, yet she ends up being the one who brings down “the Needle”. That is what I love – a downtrodden character who is not a classic heroine ends up becoming the heroine after all. It’s a wonderful example of an ordinary person doing something extraordinary."

"This was the first science thriller I ever read. I remember thinking it was the first book to make real science so exciting. The plot is a little village that has been wiped out by a strange illness. Nobody knows what the disease is, and the book examines how scientists solve this puzzle. People die horribly, no one understands the organism responsible and there is a strange creepy factor that it comes from outer space. Simply that he puts more attention on the technology than on the investigation. The illness is medical, but he takes a closer look at how scientists would go about doing the research. There is a behind-the-scenes look at medicine and science that I don’t remember ever seeing before that novel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He was a tireless researcher when writing. He would spend a couple of years just doing the research before he started to write. I think that’s what gives his books such a sense of authenticity. I do. I try to be as accurate as possible, although everyone makes mistakes. The funny thing about mistakes is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So you put the error down and you don’t stop to look it up, because you assume you know it. That is when you make mistakes. Oh yes! There are some things I am not comfortable with. One of them is details about automobiles. Whenever there is an error in my books, it usually has to do with cars. I have learned to shy away from errors about guns. Now I am very non-specific when I talk about them. When you become too specific, that is when you trip up. I have gone back into the autopsy room to make sure I remember what I learnt in medical school. When I wrote a space thriller called Gravity I spent two weeks with NASA. When a book is highly technical it requires a lot of extra digging. I approached my time with NASA as an anthropologist. When you walk onto a campus like the Johnson Space Center you are entering a different culture, and a large part of translating that into good fiction is getting the culture right. How do these people think? What is their attitude towards science? How do they talk? They have a different language, and nailing that is really important."

"When I was choosing my five books, I wanted to go for a mixture of different thrillers that have inspired me. My first three choices inspired me earlier on in my career, whereas the next two are stories that impressed me more recently. They are also both illustrative of certain trends that I see coming through in thrillers. The Informationist is a great example of turning a character on its head. We always think of the heroine as being somebody who needs to be rescued, and often female characters aren’t the heroes of the book. But in this book it is completely different. It is really a book about a female James Bond. Absolutely. She is one of the most interesting female characters I have read in a long time. What also made this book interesting is that it is set in Africa , and the author grew up in Africa. I got the sense that everything she was writing about – from the African landscape to the various dangers there – had a ring of authenticity. You don’t generally come across thrillers set in Africa unless you are talking about South African authors ."

"This is a domestic thriller, by a man writing from a female point of view. I read it when it was still in manuscript form, after an editor asked me if I wanted to do a blurb for it. I get these requests all the time. I thought, “Ah, that sounds like just a clever trick.” But he had me convinced from the first paragraph. It just feels so much like a woman’s voice. It opens quietly, with a woman waking up in bed. She sees a strange man lying beside her and thinks: “Oh my God, what have I done now?” She walks into the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror and is shocked when she sees herself 20 years older than she thinks she is. Immediately all these questions are popping up. Then she finds a note she’s written to herself. It says: “Don’t trust your husband.” It’s a great example of how you don’t need violence to have incredible suspense. The only real violence in the book is at the end. Everything else is a slow unveiling of what really happened. The woman has a form of amnesia in which her memory is erased every night. So every morning she must piece the puzzle together all over again. A lot of it is repetitive – waking up every day, experiencing the same dilemmas – so the writer risks being boring. Yet somehow he manages to make every day just as exciting. That is why I had to include it. It’s a domestic thriller with no violence – how often do you see that? I tried to choose five types here. We started with the Gothic thriller. Then there was the spy thriller, the science thriller and the domestic thriller. The Informationist is the female-driven thriller. I am sure there are others. I didn’t look at legal thrillers and military thrillers, which are also sub-genres. Now there are even supernatural thrillers. The variety of thriller stories that you can come up with is endless, and I am sure there will be some new blending ones coming out. What is really important to me is that there is a unique voice. For example, in Before I Go To Sleep that female voice was so compelling that I wanted to listen to her. I will follow a book for a character, so if the character has no spark I don’t really care what the plot is. For me, it is about the voice and the characters. That is true, but pace doesn’t have anything to do with violence or bloodshed. It has to do with a sense of something not being right. I like the feeling of being off-balance, and that is what Before I Go To Sleep has. There is a sense that something isn’t right. So you want to get to the bottom of why everything feels out of kilter."