CHOOSE ME

In their first collaboration, veterans Gerritsen and Braver unfold a painful, and painfully familiar, fable of adultery and its fatal consequences.

The tale begins with the death of one of its principals: Commonwealth University senior Taryn Moore, whose ruined body is found on the sidewalk five floors beneath her Boston apartment. Detective Frances Loomis, who catches the case, wonders why Taryn, a beautiful, accomplished student who worked her way up from her mother’s hardscrabble Maine household to be offered admission to Commonwealth, would have ended her life. Apart from some backbiting by jealous students, the only flaw Frankie can find in Taryn’s litany of accomplishments is her recent breakup with Liam Reilly, the hometown boyfriend who’d joined her at Commonwealth. A series of alternating chapters, however, gradually reveal the grand passion in Taryn’s life: her attachment to professor Jack Dorian, whose course in star-crossed lovers she’s internalized to a dangerous degree. Even as she’s pressing worshipful fellow student Cody Atwood to shadow Liam and tell her what he’s been up to (no bombshells there), Taryn’s falling under the spell of her charismatic teacher, who’s feeling neglected because of the long hours his wife spends at Mount Auburn Hospital. The revelation that both his wife and his student are pregnant sends Jack spiraling into despair just as Frankie, back in the present, is absorbing the same news in the context of Taryn’s death.

The fate of this modern-day Heloise and Abelard unfolds with minimum surprise but maximum impact.