Book Review: The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

Since giving up her medical career, Tess Gerritsen has gone on to a long and successful run as a suspense/thriller writer specializing in psychological/forensic novels. Many feature her crime-fighting duo, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles.

The Surgeon is, however, the first of the Jane Rizzoli thrillers, and it doesn’t feature Dr. Isles. Instead, Rizzoli almost has a second-banana role in the plot, giving up the limelight to Detective Thomas Moore, the most gifted and respected detective working in the Boston Police Department.

The Rizzoli and Isles books don’t necessarily have to be read in order, but I would recommend it. The characters grow and change as they go along, and it’s better if that process is more organic. This is the first Rizzoli book, so a great place to start.

As always, Gerritsen delivers a reading experience that had me churning through the pages, putting the rest of my life on hold as I tracked the vicious and clever serial killer known as “The Surgeon.” The author hooked me at the beginning with the eerie and macabre tale of his first victim, then moving into the characters of the investigating detectives.

Thomas Moore is still recovering from the sudden death of his wife two years ago. A brain aneurysm took her right out of his life without warning. When we meet him, he’s packed and ready for a long overdue vacation. But the police department believe he’s the best at tracking the monsters that prey on people.

Rizzoli comes across as more bitter and more fragile than I remembered her being from later books. Normally Rizzoli is very much in command of herself and the situations she’s involved in. It’s her family that drives her crazy. Instead, in The Surgeon Rizzoli is the only woman working on the homicide squad and she’s the object of ridicule and scorn by some of the other detectives.

I love Rizzoli’s character, her harsh ways, her abrupt manner, and her bulldog tenaciousness when she has to hang on to a case to work it till the bitter end. Some of that is missing in this novel, but not Rizzoli’s cleverness. She’s the officer who first starts putting the case together and finds the trail that gives the homicide team more to work with.

The murders are brutal, and the descriptions of them -– even though they’re couched in medical terms -– maybe be more than some readers want to read. Squeamish mystery voyeurs might want to skip over some of the descriptions of the Surgeon’s atrocities, and maybe even some of the medical crises Dr. Cordell handles in the emergency room.

I enjoyed the detail, though. As an amateur forensics person, probably prompted by CSI, I appreciated the depth that Gerritsen went to in order to tell her tale. She’s very clinical and caring, but it’s all there for better or worse.

Article Author: Mel Odom

Mel Odom is the author of over 100 novels. Winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award for 2002 and runner-up for the Christy in 2005, he's written in several genres, including tie-in novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and novelizations of Blade, XXX, and Tomb Raider. …

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