The Surgeon

The Surgeon is a suspense novel by the American writer Tess Gerritsen, published in 2001. It is the first book in the series about the detective Jane Rizzoli and the medical examiner Maura Isles, and it introduces Rizzoli as a detective working in a department that does not make her life easy.

A serial killer begins stalking the streets of Boston, breaking into the apartments of women who live alone, torturing them methodically and killing them. His medical knowledge earns him the name the police and the press use for him, and it also tells investigators that they are looking for someone trained in medicine rather than someone who has read about it.

Jane Rizzoli works the case with the detective Thomas Moore. They find that a trauma doctor, Catherine Cordell, survived an attack of the same kind several years earlier and killed the man who made it, and the connections between the deaths begin to look like a copy of a crime that is already closed. Cordell is also being watched, because the killer is working his way closer to her.