The Surgeon review

The Surgeon is the first book in Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli & Isles series, though it begins primarily as a Jane Rizzoli solo novel. In Boston, a killer is targeting women living alone — surgically precise in his method, his crimes bearing the hallmarks of a killer who operated two years earlier in Savannah, Georgia. The Savannah killer was stopped by Dr. Catherine Cordell, a physician who survived when she should not have. Now the Boston murders suggest he has resurfaced, or someone has replicated him, and Catherine Cordell is at the center of both investigations.

The book operates on two tracks. The procedural follows Jane Rizzoli, a Boston detective fighting for credibility in a department full of men who expect her to prove herself on their terms. The psychological follows Catherine Cordell, a woman who survived something catastrophic, has rebuilt a functional life around it, and must now watch that architecture come apart as the past reasserts itself. Both characters are defined by their relationship to competence — both are exceptionally good at their work, and the killer knows it.