What is The Surgeon about?

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.

Gerritsen, a practicing physician before she became a full-time novelist, brings genuine medical knowledge to the forensic and procedural details. The killer's surgical precision is not a metaphor — it is technically specific in ways that raise the stakes without requiring gory excess. The mechanism of the murders, their methodology, and the forensic reconstruction of what happened all carry the credibility of someone who knows the anatomy she is describing.

The Surgeon is tightly plotted, emotionally direct, and designed to accelerate. It introduced two characters — Rizzoli and, from the second book onward, Dr. Maura Isles — who would sustain one of crime fiction's longest-running series. As a standalone it works; as a series opener it is unusually assured. Gerritsen is not interested in ambiguity or slow revelation: she wants you to feel the threat from the first chapter, and she succeeds.