Please join the MWPA and Longfellow Books at Mechanics Hall for a book launch party and signing with Tess Gerritsen. Tess will be joined by fellow New York Times best-selling author Julia Spencer Fleming to talk about The Spy Coast, Gerritsen’s highly anticipated new thriller.
#1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci writes, “The Spy Coast is a marvelously plotted read with action-packed pages, G-force twists and turns, and a platoon of fascinating characters.” Paul Doiron, author of the Mike Bowditch novels, notes, “For decades, Midcoast Maine has enjoyed a reputation as a haven for spies living in anonymous retirement. Now bestselling author Tess Gerritsen has taken this apocryphal (or not!) premise and transformed it into a crackerjack thriller. The Spy Coast is my favorite kind of page turner, rooted in relatable, if ruthless, characters, and grounded in a meticulously observed sense of place.”
Tess Gerritsen’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels have hit bestseller lists ever since. Among her titles are Gravity, The Surgeon, Vanish, The Bone Garden, and The Spy Coast. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, and more than 40 million copies have been sold around the world.
She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award and the Rita Award. Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen” and Time Magazine named her novel The Surgeon one of the best mystery/thriller novels ever written. Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TNT television series "Rizzoli & Isles," starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.
She is also a filmmaker. She and her son Josh produced a feature-length documentary, “Magnificent Beast,” about the ancient origins of the pig taboo. It aired on PBS channels around the country. Their previous film, “Island Zero”, was a feature-length horror movie that was released in 2018.
A former military brat, New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Julia Spencer-Fleming grew up in places as diverse as Montgomery, Rome, Stuttgart and Syracuse. A graduate of Ithaca College, George Washington University and the University of Maine School of Law, she took up writing while still a stay-at-home mother of two. During the time it took to finish her first novel, she got a full-time job at a Portland, Maine, law firm and had a third child. Julia didn’t want to write yet another lawyer-sleuth, so she used her army past and a keen eye for the goings-on at her Episcopal church to create Clare Fergusson, first female priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill. The resulting series has won or been nominated for almost every American mystery award available, including the Edgar, the Anthony, and the Agatha. The 9th book in her series, Hid From Our Eyes, was published in April 2020.