She Treads Softly: The Summer Guests

Saturday, February 22, 2025

The Summer Guests

The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen
3/18/25; 363 pages
Thomas & Mercer
The Martini Club #2

The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen is a very highly recommended investigative mystery, and the excellent second novel following the equally stellar first novel, The Spy Coast, featuring the Martini Club of retired CIA agents.

Susan, Ethan and their daughter Zoe Conover are returning to the family summer home on Maiden Pond in Purity, Maine where they will meet matriarch Elizabeth, brother Colin along with his wife Brooke and their son Kit. The family is planning to scatter the ashes of recently deceased patriarch George. Soon after they arrive 15-year-old Zoe disappears and local police chief Jo Thibodeau is called in to investigate. When the Martini club, comprised of retired CIA agents, Maggie, Declan, Ben, Ingrid and Lloyd, hear about the missing teen teen they jump in to assist with the investigation, but it is much more complicated than it originally appeared.

The well-written narrative is fast-paced, complex, and intricately plotted. The narrative alternates between the point-of-view of Susan, Jo, and Maggie and it becomes very clear that there is much more going on than it originally appears. The clues lead all over the place and back in time. Nothing is as simple as it seems when the investigation opens up additional discoveries, leads, and long buried secrets. The contrast between the summer people of privilege and the common year round local residents enters into the case.

Again, everything about the novel is excellent the writing, plot, and characters. There are several twists and surprises. Once started it was impossible to put aside. I enjoyed the first novel so much, which introduces these characters that I would recommended reading it first, but readers could still enjoy this outing as a standalone. The first novel does provide much more background information about the Martini Club.

I loved The Summer Guests as much as I did the first Martini Club investigation in The Spy Coast and I hope to see them again. Thanks to Thomas & Mercer for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.