Review: THE SURGEON, Tess Gerritsen

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 544 KB
• Print Length: 432 pages
• Publisher: Transworld Digital (December 23, 2009)

Tess Gerritsen was already a well established author when THE SURGEON launched the Jane Rizzoli series in 2001. Jane is a female detective working in a man's world in the Boston Police Department. She's recently moved from Vice and Narcotics to Homicide. She's the only woman in Homicide and already there has been trouble between her and another detective. She's a woman out to make her mark.

There's a serial killer on the loose in Boston, his hallmark that he operates on his victims, removing body parts while they are still alive. Jane Rizzoli knows solving this case could be the making of her career. Her assigned partner is "Saint" Thomas Moore, the cop who never stepped over the line, never swore, never lost his cool.

THE SURGEON snags the reader straightaway, opening with a prologue from the killer's point of view.

Today they will find her body.
Today they will know we are back.

The Surgeon has a fixation of Boston doctor Catherine Cordell. His victims, we learn, are women who have already been damaged, as has Catherine Cordell, through rape. In their own ways Jane Rizzoli and Thomas Moore both step over the line, Rizzoli in a way that could mean the end of her career.

The blurb on the front of the book says THE SURGEON is a page turner - as I read this on my Kindle, the "next page" button got a rapid work out.
An excellent read and highly recommended.
Perhaps I should warn that some of the medical details may make you a little squeamish.

My rating 4.7

Read an excerpt on Gerritsen's own site.

I featured Tess Gerritsen  for my letter G in the Crime Fiction Alphabet.
You'll find in that post my reviews of  THE MEPHISTO CLUB (4.6) and THE BONE GARDEN (4.6)

My other mini-reviews:

THE SINNER (4.8)
This is the novel immediately before 'Body Double'.  Not even the icy temperatures of a typical New England winter can match the bone-chilling scene of carnage discovered at the chapel of Our Lady of Divine Light. Within the cloistered convent lie two nuns–one dead, one critically injured–victims of an unspeakably savage attacker. The brutal crime appears to be without motive, but medical examiner Maura Isles’s autopsy of the dead woman yields a shocking surprise: twenty-year-old Sister Camille gave birth before she was murdered. Then another body is found mutilated beyond recognition. Together, Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli uncover an ancient horror that connects these terrible slaughters. As long-buried secrets come to light, Maura Isles finds herself drawn inexorably toward the heart of an investigation that strikes close to home–and toward a dawning revelation about the killer’s identity too shattering to consider.  Also available as an abridged audio cassette, abridged audio CD, an abridged downloadable audiobook, an abridged downloadable audiobook and an eBook.

VANISH (4.5)
The last thing that Boston medical examiner Maura Isles expects to find in her morgue in a zipped up body bag is a Jane Doe that is still alive. And the last thing that Boston police detective Jane Rizzoli expects to happen when she goes to hospital to have her baby is to become a hostage. When these two threads combine you have an explosive mixture.