Book Review: The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen - Page 2

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.

The novel quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse pursuit that is the staple of all good suspense fiction. We get just enough glimpses of the killer’s thought processes to be thoroughly spooked – especially since it seems that the killer is someone who works at the hospital with Dr. Catherine Cordell, who is the Surgeon’s ultimate prey.

Two years before the story started, Dr. Cordell was attacked by an intern she’d flagged for failure. The young man had bound her with duct tape, then raped her and cut her up, intending to let her slowly die. Cordell had freed herself and ended up killing him. That should have ended the killing. But it didn’t.

Rizzoli has noticed the two recent murders, a year apart, are a lot like the attack on Dr. Cordell. Rizzoli suspects there’s more to the situation than what meets the eye. Of course, she’s right. But it was totally creepy to find out that the killer was giving the women he killed a piece of jewelry he stole from the woman he killed before them. That’s the kind of thing that Gerritsen does so well. She knows how to unnerve her readers.

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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