Yvonne Eisele, Ph.D., Research Associate, and Tess Gerritsen (in the lab). The Scripps Research Institute
Because she is a writer of thrillers and not a psychic, there are things Tess Gerritsen can predict and things she can’t.
For instance, the charity raffle that the “Rizzoli & Isles” author is sponsoring to benefit Alzheimer’s research at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. She doesn’t know which two lucky souls will win when the online campaign wraps on up on July 23, but she does know their reward is the chance to name a character in her next “Rizzoli & Isles” novel. She doesn’t know how much her campaign will raise, but she promises to match every dollar, up to $25,000.
And when it comes time to award the prizes, Gerritsen has no idea what these characters will be called or how they will factor into the plot. But as a veteran of other naming-rights giveaways, she’s pretty sure this good-cause raffle will result in some bad behavior.
“The weird thing is, people like their characters to be the most awful serial killers ever,” said the 60-year-old author and former physician, who was born and raised in San Diego and now lives in Maine. “Most people don’t like to be victims. It most likely won’t be a character who bites the dust.”
As the author of romantic-suspense novels, medical thrillers and the “Rizzoli & Isles” series that launched multiple best sellers and the TNT cable-TV series of the same name, Gerritsen has the white-knuckle formula wired. So why would she leave anything up to chance, especially when that thing could be the name of her next psycho-killer?
She’s doing it for love. And science. But mostly love.
In 2007, Gerritsen’s father, Ernest Brune Tom, died after a 20-year struggle with Alzheimer’s. This fundraising campaign is for him.
In life, Ernest Tom was a no-nonsense man who worked long hours as head chef at Tom Lai’s, the waterfront restaurant that was replaced by the Fish Market in the late ‘80s. Forever the pragmatist, he encouraged his “Nancy Drew”-loving daughter to pursue medicine instead of writing.
Gerritsen studied hard, aced her classes at Kearny High School and went on to Stanford, where she studied anthropology. She graduated from the UC San Francisco Medical School in 1979, then moved to Hawaii to practice internal medicine. (Gerritsen’s younger brother, Timothy, is a doctor in Corpus Christi, Texas.)
She started writing while on maternity leave, and after selling the romantic thriller “Call After Midnight” in 1986, Gerritsen took books off the back burner. The best-selling results were better than her childhood self could have ever dreamed up, but they came too late for her pragmatic father to appreciate.
“My Mom was very, very proud of me, but my father got his Alzheimer’s before he could really appreciate what was happening,” Gerritsen said of her barn-burning second career. “My Dad was a hardworking, fairly concrete guy who didn’t share too much. At the time he stopped working and I could have gotten to really know him, his brain wasn’t working. It’s like he was put on this Earth and his children never got to find out who he was. It’s a sad thing.”
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