Gerritsen, Tess: The Surgeon

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The Surgeon, originally published in 2001, is the first book in what would become Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series. In this outing, however, Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli is only a supporting character--and not a particularly likable one--while forensic pathologist Maura Isles doesn't appear at all. (She is introduced in Gerritsen's follow-up to The Surgeon, The Apprentice.) The Surgeon of Gerritsen's title is a killer who earned his nickname from the gruesome manner in which he's killed a series of women. The murders appear to be copycat crimes: a killer with a similar modus operandi had terrorized Georgia a couple years earlier. The killer also seems to be focused on one particular woman, Dr. Catherine Cordell, who is the unfortunate common link between the killings in Boston and Georgia.

It seems odd, reading The Surgeon, that Gerritsen opted to focus the series on Rizzoli: her colleague, Thomas Moore, is arguably the main character here, and he is the one I'd prefer to read more about. Rizzoli, unlike Moore, is prickly and defensive. A theme of the book is the mistreatment of women by men--not surprising given what the Surgeon is up to--but anti-female bias plays out also, if much less dramatically, in the police department: Rizzoli constantly feels that she's not accepted on the job because of her sex. Frankly, this aspect of the book seems to me a bit whiny and tiresome, but that's my only complaint about this tense and well-written novel.