The Spy Coast by Tess Gerritsen

 

"And that's what we must learn to deal with: Our place in a world that sees us as used up and irrelevant. This new generation looks only to the future, with little regard for the past and what it could teach them. What we could teach them."        -Maggie's thoughts, from the novel

Maggie Bird is a retired CIA operative living in a small town in Maine happily raising chickens. When a dead woman is found in her driveway, it is evident her past has caught up with her. Fortunately, Maggie has a group of other former spies who are friends living in the area and they take part in the investigation. This greatly frustrates Jo Thibodeau, the town's acting police chief, who is conducting the official inquiry because Maggie's friends always seem to be a few steps ahead of her. They call themselves the Martini Club and indeed the novel is the first of a series called The Martini Club.

Flashbacks take the reader back to Maggie's last mission which had gone tragically wrong. The Spy Coast is pretty much a page-turner. I will rate it 4. I will likely read other fiction by this author.

Gerritsen wrote the Rizzoli and Isles series from which a TV series was produced. I enjoyed those episodes very much. It is interesting that Gerritsen was a physician before she became a very successful writer because Isles was a medical examiner helping with Rizzoli's detective work.