Book Review: The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

I knew when I had the time to start reading novels again I needed to pick one up from Tess Gerritsen! I decided to start from the beginning of the Rizzoli and Isles series and therefore chose The Surgeon. I was not at all disappointed! I inhaled the book in an afternoon and wanted more (and thus downloaded on my kindle The Apprentice)! Right there and then, I decided that I was going to read all of the Rizzoli and Isles books this summer! A summer of crime novels! At the moment there are ten books in the series, the eleventh book will come out late 2014/early 2015. I have already reviewed Body Double (the fourth novel) and I plan on reviewing the rest of the books as well!

Back to The Surgeon, the back of the book (or well, the front of the kindle book) the plot of the book is described this way:

In Boston, there’s a killer on the loose…
A killer who targets lone women and performs terrifying ritualistic acts of torture on them before finishing them off. His surgical skills lead police to suspect he is a physician who, instead of saving lives, takes them. But as homicide detective Thomas Moore and his partner Jane Rizzoli begin their investigation, they make a startling discovery. Closely linked to these killings is Catherine Cordell, a beautiful doctor with a mysterious past. Two years ago she was subjected to a horrifying rape, and shot her attacker dead.
Now, the man she believes she killed seems to be stalking her once again. And this time he knows exactly where to find her…

The Surgeon introduces some of the main characters that are in the Rizzoli and Isles series, we get introduced to Jane Rizzoli and her family and some of the detectives (Frost, Crow, Moore). Dr. Isles isn't introduced until in the second novel The Apprentice.

The plot is great, if you have watched the Rizzoli and Isles tv-series you might recognize it since the first episode (in season one) is based on The Surgeon and The Apprentice.

The book is a mixture of first person narrative and third person narrative. The first person narrative is only from the killer perspective and the rest is in third person. I do prefer reading a novel when it is in third narrative but the first narrative wasn't bad at all. Firstly, there wasn't too much of it and secondly it wasn't a long worded ramble.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Today they will find her body"

That was the first sentence of the book, it was a part of the first narrative section and set the voice to the rest of the novel.

"Elena Ortiz had lived long enough to see her own blood spurt from her neck and hit the wall in a machine-gun spray of red. She had lived long enough to aspirate blood into her severed trachea, to hear it gurgle in her lungs, to cough it out in explosive bursts of crimson phlegm."

I found that this book had a lot of gore and blood talk, and if I hear/read the word vein couple of times I start to become a little light headed and that is how I felt during some parts of the novel.

"This was now a high-profile case. Two days ago, the headline hit the front page of the local tabloid: ‘The Surgeon Cuts Again.’ Thanks to the Boston Herald, their unsub had his own moniker, and even the cops were using it. The Surgeon."

I just really like when the mention the title of the book in the novel and I notice it!

"She'd been deprived of love so long that she’d lost all sense of hunger. Only now, as every part of her came alive, did she remember what desire felt like, and her lips sought his with the eagerness of a starved woman."

And a cliché quote that I found to be a bit too much and awkward!

All in all I loved this book, and I can't wait to read the rest of the Rizzoli and Isles series that Tess Gerritsen has written.

Bisous