Tess Gerritsen Unleashes A Chilling Small-Town Mystery In “The Summer Guests”

The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen

"Gerritsen has cleverly crafted a mystery that contains as many twists and turns as the delicate shoreline of Maiden Pond."

Purity, Maine, is nothing like its name. It is a summer tourist destination divided into the wealthy and the working-class, seasonal residents and townies, and their secrets. It is also a place where CIA agents retire, seeking the peace and quiet of a remote, pastoral lifestyle. In The Summer Guests (Thomas & Mercer), Tess Gerritsen’s second installment of The Martini Club, former CIA operative Maggie Bird has settled into farming and selling her eggs at the local farmers’ markets. Her fellow “spooks,” Declan, Ben, Ingrid and Lloyd have similarly settled into Purity with martini nights and a book club, but none of them can shake off their past covert occupations. Good thing!

Secrets Run Deep Beneath The Surface Of Maiden Pond

When a visiting teenage girl goes missing from one of the summer mansions on Maiden Pond, The Martini Club steps up to the challenge of finding the girl, despite the warnings from Acting Police Chief Jo Thidobeau. Zoe, the missing teen, is the step-granddaughter of the wealthy Conover family, who has occupied the Moonview Cottage on Maiden Pond since the 1970s. The Conovers have convened at Moonview for a two-week vacation and to commemorate the life of its patriarch, who has recently died. Their family is a mixed bag of characters, including Zoe’s mother Susan, a school nurse, Ethan, a writer suffering from writer’s block, Ethan’s bully brother and his sister-in-law, Colin and Brooke, and their reclusive teen son, Kit. The Conover’s prickly matriarch, Elizabeth, rules her clan with a tight fist, making Susan question her place in the family, especially when none of them seem concerned about Zoe’s vanishing.

Despised and feared by most locals for their standoffish manner, one of their Maiden Pond neighbors, Reuben Tarkin, has been the most aggressive toward the Conovers. But no one knows the source of his hatred.

Zoe’s disappearance triggers a manhunt throughout the Purity area, and The Martini Club always seems to be one step ahead of the cops. As spies, the group is trained to root out the evil in humankind, and their spy craft grants them access to restricted information, which alludes Jo. She suspects they are not the meddling, innocent seniors they profess to be, but Jo has no real proof otherwise. She can either accept their assistance or reject their unorthodox help. Either way, Jo is left with determining whether Zoe was abducted or drowned in the pond.

Two Bodies One Town And A Race To Uncover The Truth

When Maggie’s neighbor becomes a prime suspect, she rallies her troops to prove his innocence. But when the authorities discover a decomposed body in Maiden Pond while searching the pond for Zoe, the club and Jo face two unsolved mysteries.

The more Maggie and her crew dig, the murkier the situation becomes. Especially with no leads to expose what happened to Zoe or the identity of the ancient corpse submerged in the pond.

Told from multiple points of view, the reader is immersed in Susan’s desperation to locate her daughter, Jo’s attempts to solve the tragic mysteries, Maggie who is trying to remain useful in her retirement, and Reuben, a man haunted by a decades-old murder committed by his father.

Gerritsen has cleverly crafted a mystery that contains as many twists and turns as the delicate shoreline of Maiden Pond. The Summer Guests is not only a mystery but holds a magnifying glass up to class tension in a small community, the power of friendship, and how past sins cast a lingering shadow on the present. The Summer Guests makes the reader hope Gerritsen has more adventures in store for her engaging Martini Club.

A Quartet of Questions for Tess Gerritsen

When you were working on The Spy Coast did you conceptualize it as a series or standalone?

It (The Martini Club) wasn’t supposed to be a series. I wrote The Spy Coast about (Maggie) a spy, who lived abroad, so there were a lot of international settings in the book. The second book, “The Summer Guests,” was inspired by something very local that I had learned about the retired CIA community that lives in my town. And that was that we had a branch on MK Ultra (a controversial government operation that performed human experiments using psycho-active drugs) operating in my town in the 1950s-1970s. I thought that was interesting and wanted to include this in a story. So, I chose to write a story that was closer to home. Also, I wanted to show more about Jo Thibodeau, my local police officer. About how she operates, and how she begins to finally bond with these retired spies, and their working together.

The Spy Coast series also seems to be a commentary on aging and the way we view seniors in our society. For example, Chief Jo writes off the Martini Club but comes around. What made you write about aging?

Yes, Jo is one of those people. Jo is in her mid-30s. She’s a local girl. She’s a good solid main character. She’s a good cop. But she’s young, and so when she deals with these older spies in the first book, you find out she thinks they are meddling old people. Again and again, they are always steps ahead of her when they’re investigating something, and they come up with things she didn’t even think about. It is making Jo question her own ability, and it also makes her wonder who these people are, and how are they always ahead of her. In the second book, she knows who they are, and she appreciates their contributions, although she can’t always use them or acknowledge their help. It is the conflict between youth and older people.

I couldn’t have written this book 30 years ago. I needed to be this age. I needed to know what it feels like to be older and overlooked, and not valued by young people who know everything, but who really don’t. There’s value to history.

The Summer Guests seems to be a social commentary about the struggle between the classes — the wealthy who own the mansions and summer cottages in Purity and those who are paid to maintain them for those families. That’s a timely topic given the immigration issues and deportations we are witnessing. Were you inspired by current events, or was this a coincidence?

There are so many levels of conflict in this story. No, it was inspired by what I see during the summertime. The immigrants arrive during the summer from other countries to work at these large hotels, taking care of the people who stay at them or their summer houses. We are having an immigration crisis because we can’t get the workers to come to the country anymore, and it’s very hard on our local economy. And there are not enough local workers to man the hotels. The theme of “haves and have nots” goes back to the cave dweller days.

Variety reported that Spy Coast is in development at Amazon MGM (you and James Bond) First look deal with Will Graham and Field Trip production Banner. Any news on that front?

The pilot episode has been written and submitted. I’ve read it. It’s very good. We should have a decision about whether it is going to be greenlight in the next couple of weeks.

What’s next for The Martini Club — The Shadow Friends due out in November 2026?

This will be the 3rd book in The Martini Club series, and it takes a closer look at Ingrid and her husband. Ingrid is a fellow spy, and she’s married to a retired CIA analyst who was never actually a spy, but they have a cozy, domestic relationship. Out of the blue, one of her ex-lovers shows up in town during a local global security conference. This introduces a new crisis into her life, not just in her marriage. There is an assassin they had dealt with years before who seems to be back at work, and Ingrid’s ex-lover tries to pull her back into the field. If there is one word that emotionally describes this book, it’s “longing.”

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