Body Double

Body Double is a thriller by the American writer Tess Gerritsen, published in 2004 and the fourth book in the series about the medical examiner Maura Isles and the detective Jane Rizzoli.

The plot begins with a piece of evidence no pathologist would welcome and works outward from it: the dead woman was shot, and the possibility that she was a relative Maura did not know about forces her to go looking into her own family, which turns out to have been arranged around information she was never given. Gerritsen was a physician before she wrote fiction, and the series keeps the medical detail exact, including the DNA work and the procedure around the autopsy, while the investigative side is carried by Rizzoli, who is heavily pregnant for most of the book and working anyway. The novel also runs a second case in parallel, involving a woman who is humiliated in a car showroom and the violence that follows from it, and the two strands are connected by the same person. The Rizzoli and Isles books began with The Surgeon and were adapted for television in 2010.