Best-selling author Tess Gerritson's 32 books have sold 40 million copies in 40 countries.

Dr. Gerritson has made use of her medical knowledge in her thrillers, but probably is best known for creating the homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles characters for a series of novels that led to the TV series Rizzoli and Isles.

Gerritson’s latest book -- The Spy Coast – is the start of a new series. On The Spark Tuesday, she described the story,"It is about retired spies who are called back to duty when a dead body shows up on one of their driveways. And it takes place in a little town in Maine, very much like the town I live in. And I also happen to live in a town that seems to have a lot of retired spies as well. So I feel like I'm writing about where I live and about people I know. I found out about this about 30 years ago when I first moved here. It's a little town. It's quiet. It's mostly tourists come in in the summertime. And my husband, who is a doctor, opened up a practice. He would always ask his patients for an occupational history. And this is the answer he got sometimes. I used to work for the government and he'd say, What did you do for the government? And they would say, I can't talk about it. Well, after a couple of times he thought, "What is going on around us? Who are these people?" And it was a local real estate agent who told us they were all retired CIA. And I found out later that I had two two retired spies on my little street where I lived. I found out that my son's best friend, their parents were married spies. And it was a new way of looking at my neighbors. Suddenly I saw these retired people in the post office and in the grocery store. And I thought, you must have had an interesting life, but you can't talk about it. And that's why I wrote this book."

Tess Gerritson will talk about The Spy Coast and her career at The Friends of Public Libraries of Lancaster County a week from Thursday, November 9th at Calvary Church in Lancaster.

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