The Surgeon (2001)

There's a killer stalking his prey in Boston. The victims are killed in a brutal way: cut across the abdomen to remove their uterus and then slashed across the throat. Whomever is killing these women has surgical skill and knowledge. Is it a doctor? Nicknamed "the Surgeon" by the media, he eludes the police until he starts targeting prestigious doctor Catherine Cordell, the only surviving victim of a rash of similar murders in Savannah years ago. Can she help crack the case before it's too late?

The first novel in what has now become a series featuring Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles (and the basis for the TNT show), Gerritsen crafts a tightly-woven book full of medical jargon and reads just like a TV procedural. A mediocre one.

Perhaps I'm not the audience for suspense/thrillers. Maybe I'm missing something, but my connection to this book was borderline nil. I finished it because I wanted to see how it ended (pretty much as I predicted), but there wasn't anything about this book that made me feel like I was on the edge of my seat or completely at a loss as to what was going to happen next. It was mostly predictable. Unless the reader is a die-hard medical crime junkie, many of the scenes will seem completely unnecessary and often too long. I found the characters unsympathetic, irritating, or completely bland. When the reader doesn't care whether everyone lives or dies is usually not the author's objective, but it was accomplished for this girl.

Part of me has a masochistic desire to see if the second novel is any better, but the rest of me says life's too short to waste any more time on a disappointing series. ( )

This is a very decent mystery story. The only odd thing is that it's labeled as "Jane Rizzoli & Maura Isles Series #1). This is odd because the character of Maura Isles never appears in the book. And Jane Rizzoli appears to be secondary to another character, a Detective Thomas Moore. So I spent most of the book wondering why Rizzoli was secondary and Isles was absent. A decided distraction from the plot of the story. ( )

This was what I needed. As I said before not my normal genre. I read this genre a lot years ago. It is not mystery but more thriller type.
Really enjoyed it and I wish I'd had more books like this so i could pick another one..
One thing I was wondering about. You see that the book sometimes is called Jane Rizolli book number 1. but she doesn't really have the main lead in this book. I guess people were so interested by her, or the author? so that she decided to write more of her?
What I liked is that this Jane Rizolli is not beautiful, men are not attracted to her, hallelujah and she makes mistakes? WTH! I love a character like that as the main one in a book.
Really want to read the next books of this series now. ( )

Trigger warnings: rape, mutilation, medical details (both descriptions of stuff like cancer and descriptions of accidents/operations).

That had to come first, because I spent much of this book wishing I had something firm and indestructible to crawl into, to keep me safe. The details are just horrifying -- it reminds me very much of my experience with Val McDermid's work. And, as with that, I had to read to the end to find out who the killer/torturer was, before I could begin to feel okay again. (The part of me that's done a course in Crime Fiction remembers that the end of a crime novel typically ends with the criminal being contained or killed, and therefore that provides a feeling of safety and the reassertion of the rules of society, for a reader.)

I wasn't really a fan of the characters' attitudes to rape. The idea that rape makes the victim belong to the attacker in some way is just repugnant, and the idea that what makes a woman a woman is their womb is just -- ugh. It seemed to be an ongoing theme in the story, rather than an opinion expressed by just one or two of the characters.

Overall there was a lot that upset/troubled me, and despite Sasha Alexander being in it, I don't think I'm going to watch the tv series. It's not actually a bad crime/mystery book: it's very good in that sense, and I'd recommend it to people who like, for example, Val McDermid. But it was just not the kind of thing I should be reading at all, and I'm going to steer clear. ( )

I read this... and two weeks later I can't remember anything about it. It also took a lot of self prodding to get through the book. I had this as part of the overall R&I series from the library but could only push myself enough to finish this one. I found myself glad that the show's pace is much better. Maybe author's writing within the series improved later, but although I love the show, I couldn't get myself to read the rest of the omnibus. Only thing that stands out in my memory was that I had little sympathy for the characters. ( )