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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "A briskly paced, terrifically suspenseful work that steadily builds toward a tense and terrifying climax."--People (Page-turner of the week) He slips into homes at night and walks silently into bedrooms where women lie sleeping, about to awaken to a living nightmare. The precision of his methods suggests that he is a deranged man of medicine, prompting the Boston newspapers to dub him "The Surgeon." Led by Detectives Thomas Moore and Jane Rizzoli, the cops must consult the victim of a nearly identical crime: Two years ago, Dr. Catherine Cordell fought back and filled an attacker before he could complete his assault. Now this new killer is re-creating, with chilling accuracy, the details of Cordell's ordeal. With every new murder he seems to be taunting her, cutting ever closer, from her hospital to her home. And neither Moore nor Rizzoli can protect Cordell from a ruthless hunter who somehow understands--and savors--the secret fears of every woman he kills. "[A] top-grade thriller . . . Sharp characters stitch your eye to the page. An all-nighter."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Creepy . . . will exert a powerful grip on readers."--Chicago Tribune… (more)
User reviews
Gerritsen keeps multiple subplots in play throughout the novel: a series of crimes in Boston that mirror those The Surgeon committed in Georgia years before, the efforts of Rizzoli and her partner Thomas Moore to solve them, Cordell’s traumatic flashbacks to her ordeal, threats against her that may be coming from the copycat killer, and the tangled personal lives of all three. Gerritsen balances them well, but the sheer number means that most of them are developed, most of the time, in fairly schematic ways. The police work is satisfying but streamlined, Rizzoli’s fight against marginalization (as the “new guy” and only woman among the detectives) is believable but over-familiar, and the identity of the killer feels—for lack of alternate suspects—almost inevitable. The story is consistently engrossing, but rarely gripping.
A consistent exception—not surprisingly, given Gerritsen’s medical background—are the hospital scenes of Cordell at work. They work both as medical drama and as characterization, establishing her as a tough, competent, resourceful woman, and rendering her actions (past and present alike) plausible. They make Cordell the one fully-realized character in the novel—though Moore comes close—and that, in turn, works to the book’s immeasurable benefit, since she takes center stage more and more often as the multi-threaded plot spins toward its climax. Reading The Surgeon with no real sense of where the series is going, I found myself looking forward to watching Gerritsen do similar things with Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles.
So, I've
Craving more characterization than this book gave, but since it's the first of a series, I can be patient. I'm trying not to hate book Rizzoli, but she really makes it hard, being so bitchy and one dimensional. Again, I'll be patient.
Good, believable story with decent characterization. I kind of wish that Dr. Cordell became the focus of the series, but I think that's Ms. Gerritsen's point. Rizzoli has her flaws and it's what makes her real.
I have read so many serial killer novels, that I tend to get bored by them. There is only so much that can be done on the subject, and it pretty much has already been done before. With the lack of new ground, there has to be something that really stands out to make it interesting. Nothing stands out about this novel. The writing is certainly solid and I don’t have much to complain about. It’s very obvious early on that the person performing the murders is someone who was involved with the original murderer, so the reveal is hardly surprising. Everything else about the novel is fairly generic and not horribly compelling. Not that this was a bad novel, it just doesn’t stand out.
Carl Alves – author of Blood Street
There's a serial killer on the loose in Boston, his hallmark that he operates on his victims, removing body parts while they are still alive. Jane Rizzoli knows solving this case could be the making of her career. Her assigned partner is "Saint" Thomas Moore, the cop who never stepped over the line, never swore, never lost his cool.
THE SURGEON snags the reader straightaway, opening with a prologue from the killer's point of view.
Today they will find her body.
Today they will know we are back.
The Surgeon has a fixation of Boston doctor Catherine Cordell. His victims, we learn, are women who have already been damaged, as has Catherine Cordell, through rape. In their own ways Jane Rizzoli and Thomas Moore both step over the line, Rizzoli in a way that could mean the end of her career.
The blurb on the front of the book says THE SURGEON is a page turner - as I read this on my Kindle, the "next page" button got a rapid work out.
An excellent read and highly recommended.
Perhaps I should warn that some of the medical details may make you a little squeamish.
If you like the TV Series of 'Rizzoli
This book was so enjoyable that I read it under 20 hours.
Review written in March, 2011
On one hand, the book was highly engaging. It was easy to read and drove me to keep going because I just needed to know what would happen next. The book shifts perspective from a third person narration following the detective side of the case to
Now the bad. Something was making me uncomfortable, and it took me about half the book to put my finger on it. Men are portrayed in an extremely unflattering light in this book. They all fall into one of three categories: douchebags who look down on women, "nice guys" who find vulnerability attractive, or murderers and rapists. In the whole book, there is only one man who might be an exception to this rule.
I ended up going with four stars to give Gerritsen the benefit of the doubt. A lot of the book is told from the perspective of a female cop having a tough time in a male world (Rizzoli), so it kind of makes sense. I'd have to read another work of hers to see if this is a theme.
One more note: this book is not for the faint of heart. There's murder and rape and grisly details. Gerritsen is an M.D., and it shows. The book is littered with medical details which I found added a certain authentic feel.
However, it is the contrasts in the mental outlooks of a Dr. Cordell, rape victim, and the killer, that provide a deeper human interest than normally present in detective stories. The two mind sets: a rape victim's enduring, persistent, silent and unseen trauma of "life-after-being-raped" contrasted with the killer's self-satisfaction and self-justifying thought patterns, implying that ancient societies' rites of "serial" human sacrifice legitimize his own actions.
I started this and couldn't stop reading until I knew who was the killer :)