Skip to main content

Mystery author #37 Tess Gerritsen

Title: The Surgeon
Series detective: Jane Rizzoli – in this book with Thomas Moore
No. in series: 1
Year of publication: 2001
Type of mystery: Serial murder, police procedural, thriller
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Boston, USA; modern timeless

SPOILER Warning: if you haven't read the books, there is a minor spoiler for book 1 in the synopsis for book 2. There are also minor spoilers in the reviews.

Story:
A serial murderer is on the loose in Boston and his handiwork is chillingly similar to that of another serial murderer who has been dead for 2 years, killed in self-defense by his last victim, Dr. Catherine Cordell. Police detectives Jane Rizzoli and Thomas Moore begin to suspect that there might have been two killers working together, but Cordell has no memory of another man. Before long, it becomes apparent that the killer has fixated on Cordell and has plans for her. The killer is relentless and when he captures Cordell, it is a race against time to find his lair before he kills her.

Review:
Since I actually read The Apprentice first, I can’t help comparing the two books. The Apprentice is the better of the two, but that is not to say that The Surgeon isn’t a good thriller. It is, and I might have found it better if I had not known who the killer was. Having read the second book first, the story was for me less about finding out who the killer was (he features in the second book too), than seeing the police discover his identity.
While it is Jane Rizzoli who is the series detective, it is not really that obvious here, as Moore is actually the better developed of the two detectives. This may originally have been intended as a stand-alone book, or perhaps the beginning of a series about Moore and not Rizzoli.

Rating: 3 stars.
--

Title: The Apprentice
Series detective: Jane Rizzoli
No. in series: 2
Year of publication: 2002
Type of mystery: Serial murder, police procedural, thriller
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Boston, modern timeless

Story: It's been two years since Detective Jane Rizzoli captured a serial killer, nearly losing her own life in the process. Now someone is using some of his methods when killing young married women, but also some new methods, and Jane and her team suspect that they are either looking for a copycat who has blended his own methods with the other man’s, or the known killer has an apprentice. When he escapes and it becomes clear that he and the other murderer are working together and their dream target may be Jane. The Boston police have to race against time to stop the murderous tag-team from killing more people, and to find out the identity of the second killer.

Review: It's been a while since I have read a serial murder thriller this good – in fact I think the last one was an early Patricia Cornwell novel. The writing is well-paced and the suspense is nearly relentless and conforming to the classic formula each climax is bigger than the previous one. The episodes (or should I call them 'acts'?) are seamlessly connected and the characters believable, except perhaps the mysterious FBI man who remains wooden throughout, and the mystery killer who is always merely a dark, nameless shadow, a bogeyman to spice up the race to track down the known villain.

I do have a gripe with one storytelling technique used in both books. Of course I am no expert on the mentality of serial murderers, but I know enough to think that the serial killer seems realistic, even though his thoughts – which we get to see now and then throughout the story – are somewhat too literary and coherent (very few if any people think in coherent sentences all the time when not formulating something to say or write down), but I suppose this must be forgiven as it is a well-known literary device and stream-of-consciousness writing is not a device that goes well with the thriller form except in very small dozes..


Rating: 4 stars.

Verdict:
I am definitely adding Gerritsen to my “continue to read” list.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme