When a normal person finishes reading a good mystery or suspense novel, she closes the book with a satisfied sigh and says, "Wow, that was good." A writer is more likely to turn back to the first page and mutter, "I'm going to tear this story apart and figure out why it works." In the Mystery Analysis group, which I moderate for the Sisters in Crime Guppies Chapter, we regularly gang up on unsuspecting novels and, like ruthless medical examiners, slice away at them until they bleed their secrets. Our reward is an understanding of the techniques used by successful authors--and the mistakes that even the best writers make.

Our latest victim was The Sinner, from Tess Gerritsen's bestselling series featuring Boston Detective Jane Rizzoli and M.E. Maura Isles. We focused on Gerritsen's techniques for creating and maintaining suspense, in the hope of avoiding the dreaded judgment that many of us have received from agents or editors: "The mystery didn't generate enough suspense to keep me turning the pages."

The Sinner doesn't have a lot of physical action and it lacks the urgency of a ticking-clock suspense novel. Yet Mystery Analysis member Leslie Budewitz said she stayed up late to finish the book even on the second reading, when she knew what was going to happen.

How does Gerritsen do it?

The Sinner has the essential ingredients of any successful crime novel: vivid protagonists, a riveting mystery, atmospheric settings. Point of view alternates between Maura, a beautiful, lonely doctor whose colleagues call her the Queen of the Dead, and Rizzoli, a rough-edged detective who never gives herself a break. Both women have personal problems. Maura's cheating ex-husband shows up and woos her into bed, only to leave her wondering if he's a killer. Rizzoli faces an unplanned pregnancy and believes the father will want nothing to do with her or the baby. To complicate matters, he's an FBI agent with whom she has to work closely.

Maura and Rizzoli confront a baffling case: two nuns in a cloistered order have been viciously attacked in their convent's chapel. The younger nun, Camille, is dead, and the older one is near death. This would be enough to intrigue most mystery readers, but it gets better when Maura's autopsy reveals that Sister Camille recently gave birth. What happened to the baby? Who was the father? Would he kill to keep the baby's paternity a secret?

Camille's child, as it turns out, is not the central mystery but what MA member Carolyn Mulford called "a whale-sized red herring" that pulls the reader through the first part of the book. It's more than a brilliant piece of misdirection, though. It's a mystery within the mystery that pays off near the book's end in one of the most satisfying acts of justice you're ever likely to read about

The story's scope expands to include more murders, lepers in India, corporate malfeasance, and church and charity officials who take bribes to cover up unspeakable horrors, yet it never loses its intimate focus on Maura and Rizzoli.

The Sinner takes place during a bleak, snowy winter, with Christmas thrown in to lend poignancy. The settings, such as the gloomy convent that houses mostly ill and elderly nuns and an abandoned restaurant where rats have been feasting on a woman's body, create an aura of danger and foreboding.

These are all great story elements. But the book is suspenseful because of Gerritsen's writing style and the way she manipulates her material (and the reader's emotions).

"Analyzing The Sinner drove home several useful lessons that I'm trying to incorporate into my work in progress," Carolyn said. "The importance of maximizing setting to establish mood and reveal character. The feasibility of a truly complex plot involving both the mystery and the protagonists. The potential for a whale-sized red herring. Possibilities for an unbalanced use of two POVs. The effectiveness of using suspense within (and occasionally across) chapters and not just in the whole."

Rhonda Lane said she's already seen a difference in her own writing as a result of studying Gerritsen's work. She learned "a lot about building suspense through cliffhanger chapter endings, description shown through a filter of danger, misdirection, contrasts, using the weather to evoke mood, posing questions to be answered later, milking the scenes of every possible drop of threat and action. Gerritsen is so good at describing the physical manifestations of fear. Her word choice is evocative. Also, as the action peaks, her sentences get shorter. And, for impact, some paragraphs are one line."

Rhonda pointed out that Gerritsen's most suspenseful scenes follow a pattern: the character notices something strange is happening; she has an instinctual fear reaction that provokes a physical reaction; then she tries desperately to regain control by analyzing what's happening and giving it a rational label.

For K.B. Inglee, Gerritsen's ability to propel the reader through the story served as a useful lesson. "As a short story writer, I have a tendency to want to wrap up the chapters. I watched the way Gerritsen's chapters ended and the next began. I hope this will translate into something that will keep the reader from putting the book down at the end of each chapter." Gerritsen, K.B. added, "sets a scene very well. More than just a description of the place, she gives it a feeling. She also uses changing point of view to give readers exactly what she wants them to know."

Silvia Foti admired the way Gerritsen draws out a scene to heighten suspense, holding back information to deliver a punch at the end, where it will have maximum impact. Moving through a suspenseful scene at just the right pace is a skill that many writers have trouble mastering. "She makes it look so easy," Sylvia said, "but I know how hard it can be to draw a scene out, to know how long you have to draw it out before getting on a reader's nerves."

Carol Baier noted that Gerritsen sets up all of the major story questions in the prologue and opening chapters. Although she spins out subplots and introduces new developments, everything revolves in the end around the questions posed at the beginning of the book.

Even when a scene is centered on a personal subplot, Gerritsen seldom lets the mystery thread go slack. She jerks the reader back to it with a snap--a new development, a revelation or the promise of one. She uses every opportunity to create tension. For example, instead of having Maura's ex-husband come to her office, Gerritsen has him wait in the shadowy parking garage like a stalker and approach Maura wordlessly. She feels ambushed, and so does the reader. Such choices by the author inject suspense into scenes that otherwise would have little.

Often, Gerritsen builds suspense by relying on readers' familiarity with genre conventions and on our emotional reactions to certain situations. A scene near the beginning of the book takes Maura and Rizzoli into the convent's dark attic to investigate strange sounds. Rizzoli is a tough cop with a gun and they should be safe, but Gerritsen knows such a situation would spook most people and she plays out the scene for maximum suspense and fright value. The book's climactic scene, where Maura is threatened in her home by the killer, is less successful because its elements are too familiar. Yes, having someone break into your house to kill you would be terrifying, but we've all read this kind of scene many times. "Still," Carol said, "based on the breath-sucking moments she gave me, I'd vote the scene a success."

The book would have been more gripping, we all agreed, if Gerritsen's male characters were as strongly written as the women. Even the elderly nun who heads the convent is more memorable than the killer and Maura's ex-husband. In addition to stronger male characters, we would have liked a more imaginative ending. "Gerritsen excels at the pacing of scenes and the mingling of subplots and of personal and professional problems," Carolyn said. "She has room to grow on plot credibility and character development."

Would most readers notice all the details, good and bad, that we pored over? Probably not. But readers certainly feel the cumulative impact of a writer's techniques. The writer has to worry over every tiny aspect of a story so the reader can sit back and enjoy it without hitting any bumps along the way. The Sinner isn't perfect, but our study of it has helped Mystery Analysis members sharpen our own writing.