"The Surgeon" by Tess Gerritsen

I have always been a fan of suspense novels and have read many in my time, so for this week's assignment I decided to try an author that is entirely new to me. How would I best find a new author without browsing through the fiction shelves for hours? (Not that I don't enjoy doing just that, but let's face it, I don't have a lot of free time lately and so I must spend it reading the book, not browsing for one.) This led me to NoveList, which thankfully I am able to access through IMCPL. NoveList led me to Tess Gerritsen, whom I had never heard of, but she writes a series about a female detective and female medical examiner in Boston. Perhaps you have heard of the TV show made from it, Rizzoli and Isles? Turns out I watch this show, so I decided to give the book series a try.

Well, it turns out that Maura Isles is not yet a character in the first book, The Surgeon, and that Jane Rizzoli is not the main character, which I found to be interesting since this book is considered to be the first in the Rizzoli and Isles series. This is a medical suspense novel that follows Dr. Catherine Cordell, a heart surgeon with a dark past. Women are being brutally tortured and killed across the city of Boston by a serial killer with a deep medical knowledge that he puts to use in the killings. This killer is focused on Dr. Cordell, who was the only survivor of a series of identical killings years before.

This is a relatively fast paced book, as are most suspense novels. It follows believable characters in a modern-day setting of Boston. The characters are far from perfect, with even the police showing that they sometimes break the rules. You get narrative from the killer himself, slowly helping you to try to figure out who he is, as the characters in the story do the same, but without this advantage. There is some graphic violence in the story, and also a bit of a love story involved.

Overall, this is a book that readers of medical suspense stories would enjoy, and I would be interested to read the rest of the series to see how they become more centered around Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles. If you don't like the series, you may still like the TV show, which does draw ideas from the books but seems to take its own creative liberties, as do most.

Some read-alikes are the Temperance Brennan mysteries by Kathy Reich (the TV series Bones is based on these books), the In Death series by J.D. Robb, and the Theresa MacLean series by Lisa Black.