Thriller presaged recent headlines

BLOODSTREAM by Tess Gerritsen, Pocket Books, 1998, 324 pages, $23.

Sheriff Lincoln Kelly finally asks Dr. Claire Elliot the question she has been dreading. Why have she and her teen-age son moved to this sleepy Maine village on the edge of Locust Lake?

“They come here, these people from away, and they think they’ve found paradise. Maybe they’re on summer vacation. Maybe they’re just passing through, and the name of the town catches their fancy. Tranquility. It sounds safe, a place to run to, a place to hide …”

But these days, Tranquility is not living up to its name. The town’s teen-age boys are out of control. One of them goes on a shooting rampage at school, killing a teacher and injuring his classmates. The old folks have seen this kind of violence grip the young men of their community before.

They couldn’t explain it in 1946, or 100 years before that, and they cannot explain why it is happening today. Dr. Elliot, the town’s new doctor, however, is determined to discover the cause of these sudden violent outbursts before her own son gets caught up in the bloodstream.

Tess Gerritsen’s third medical thriller, “Bloodstream” is not simply torn from recent headlines. The May murders in Springfield, Ore., are the undercurrent that drive the novel. Even though the novel was completed long before 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents, then went on a shooting rampage at Thurston High School, that recent tragedy churns under every plot twist.

What Gerritsen offers in this book is the explanation every parent, teacher, student and stunned TV viewer wants — it wasn’t the kids’ or the parents’ fault. It was what was in the water that made them do it. These kids couldn’t, they REALLY couldn’t, help themselves, Dr. Elliot discovers.

It turns out the sheriff is right about Claire’s motives for moving to Tranquility. She is running away from something — the pain of her husband’s recent death and her son’s inability to deal with the loss of his father. The small town Claire imagines does not exist, Lincoln Kelly tells her. She is about to have his observation confirmed.

Gerritsen, who lives and writes in Camden, is an internist who gave up medicine to devote her time to writing and to raising her two sons, now in their teens. “Harvest,” her first novel, made the New York Times best-seller list. “Life Support,” her second, was released last fall. All three books feature woman physicians as the protaganists who must battle not only science, but the medical bureaucracy and their male colleagues as well, before they can solve the mystery.

While the plot of “Bloodstream” unfolds at a fine pace, the ending is too rushed, facts and characters tumbling off the pages, sweeping away the reader like a flash flood in summer. In the end, the scientific explanation for why these teen-age boys become so violent seems absolutely unbelievable and implausible.

And, in light of the number of bloody rampages that took place in the nation’s schoolyards and classrooms over the past year, the timing of the publication of “Bloodstream” by Pocket Books is irresponsible at best, disrespectful of the families whose children were murdered by other children at worst.

No doubt, Gerritsen’s latest novel will be purchased for film or television as were her previous two books. No doubt, some people will read this book and look for a medical rather than a psychological explanation for these acts of violence. No doubt, others simply will dismiss the author’s premise altogether and point to these school shootings as proof that evil does exist.

In her next novel, Gerritsen should stay out of the headlines and stick to hospital intrigue. She also needs to take more care in wrapping up her plots. Readers who struggled through high school chemistry and biology need more time to absorb the science she offers as the mystery’s solution.

Tess Gerritsen will be at Borders Books Music and Cafe in Bangor at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 14, to autograph her new book and to meet with fans.