What is The Apprentice about?

The Apprentice is the second book in the Rizzoli & Isles series and the novel where forensic pathologist Dr. Maura Isles enters the series as Jane Rizzoli's professional partner. In Boston, a killer is replicating the precise signature of the Surgeon — a convicted killer currently imprisoned. Someone is either working from intimate knowledge of his methods or working with him. Rizzoli and Isles must determine which, while the FBI circles the case and complicates everything.

The central horror of the book is not the murders themselves but the idea of the apprentice: that evil can be taught, refined, and transmitted. Gerritsen develops the psychology of mimicry with care — the copycat is not simply imitating; there is a hierarchy here, a student and a teacher, and the student has surpassed the curriculum in ways that disturb even the forensic professionals studying the crimes. The imprisoned original killer, Warren Hoyt, is one of the series' most effectively drawn antagonists precisely because the novel keeps him behind glass — we understand his power through what it produces, not through direct confrontation.

Maura Isles arrives as a fully realized character: cool, analytically precise, comfortable with death in a way that reads as professional composure until the novel quietly reveals it as something older and more personal. Her partnership with Rizzoli is defined by contrast — Rizzoli is heat and instinct, Isles is method and restraint — but Gerritsen resists making one approach superior. Both are necessary, and both leave the other exposed in specific ways.

The Apprentice improves on The Surgeon in almost every dimension. The procedural is tighter, the character work deeper, the FBI subplot adds genuine complication rather than administrative friction, and the resolution earns its darkness. If you read The Surgeon and found it promising but not quite convincing, The Apprentice is where the series becomes a commitment.