The surgeon
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The surgeon (Engl .: The Surgeon ) is a 2001 published novel from the genre of Medical thriller American author Tess Gerritsen . It is the first of twelve novels (as of December 2017) in the Maura Isles & Jane Rizzoli series about the rough detective of the Boston homicide squad.
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Blurb
A series of gruesome murders shakes the East American metropolis. The perpetrator, called a "surgeon" by the media, penetrates the homes of single women at night, ties them up and, with full consciousness, operates the uterus out of them. The surgeon mimicked the crimes of serial killer Andrew Capra down to the last detail, who two years earlier had been killed by his only surviving victim, Dr. Catherine Cordell, overwhelmed and killed. Since various details of the old events were never published, the police are puzzled. It is also inexplicable how the surgeon chose his victims. What they all have in common is that they were raped a few weeks before they were murdered. In all cases there were different perpetrators. Some of these rapes were not reported. A hypnosis interview with the only surviving victim, Dr. Cordell reveals evidence that a second perpetrator was involved in Capra's murders. At the same time, it becomes clear that the surgeon sees Cordell as his ultimate goal. He wants to avenge the death of his partner and complete the work that has been started. A dramatic race for the young woman's life begins.
action
During a sultry summer, Boston is hit by a gruesome series of murders. The florist Elena Ortiz is the night for the 12th July victim of a cruel murder. The perpetrator climbs into the Hispanic woman's apartment via the fire escape, overwhelms her with chloroform and tortures the tied woman on her bed. He removes her uterus while she is still alive . The homicide squad around Detective Jane Rizzoli is charged with investigating the brutal case. Diana Sterling dies the same way. With the help of computer research, they reveal parallels to another series of murders that had occurred in Savannah . The modus operandi has striking parallels. Here, too, the victims were drugged and raped , albeit with Rohypnol . One of them was the promiscuous “party girl” Dora Ciccone. The doctor Dr. Andrew Capra mutilated and killed four women until he was told by Dr. med Catherine Cordell was shot dead after being raped in self-defense.
In the meantime, Dr. Cordell moved to Boston and became a successful vascular surgeon at the city hospital. Rizzoli's team find her and confront her with her past, to which she reacts disturbed. Elena as well as Catherine were members of a self-help group for raped women on the Internet , in which they talked about their traumatic experiences, because their stigma in the patriarchal society gives them no understanding.
In the clinic, weird things happen around Dr. Cordell. So z. For example, her lab coat and stethoscope from her immediate surroundings, and a photo of a handcuffed woman is sent to her by email , which scares the doctor to death because she believes that Andrew Capra has come back to life. Meanwhile, the team of investigators is trying to narrow down the perpetrator profile. Based on the times of the crime, you come to the thesis that the murderer is able to suppress his hunting instinct for a longer period of time until it breaks out again. You can find historical parallels with the murder of Jack the Ripper to Annie Chapman , who also removed an organ. The biographies of the victims Ortiz and Sterling show no similarities, only that they discussed their rape trauma in said anonymous chat room and that they wore the same bracelet. Nina Peyton becomes the surgeon's third victim. However, she survived the attack and is admitted to hospital with very serious injuries, where her Dr. Cordell saves life in a complicated emergency operation. Peyton, too, had previously been raped after she was stunned with knockout drops by a stranger in the Bar Gramercy Pub . Rizzoli, who visits this place, the bar, which is very popular with the flirtatious youth and where perpetrators and victims presumably met by chance, appears as a kind of “ water hole in the desert where the paths of predators and prey cross .” Unlike the other victims, Nina Peyton's ordeal lasted a whole night. Rizzoli suspects that he wants to increase his pleasure by delaying the woman's torment to an unbearable level.
The criminal psychologist Dr. Sugar, the thesis of that the serial killer primarily possessiveness, injury and humiliation goes. It is speculated that the perpetrator did not perform the coup de grace, not because he was disturbed, but because he wanted the woman to survive. Rizzoli already recognizes signs of megalomania in this pattern , similar to the cases of the well-known serial offenders Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy , which ultimately led to their capture. They ended up losing control of their fantasies. He wants her to represent a kind of sacrifice, which he gives to the actual object of desire: Dr. Catherine Cordell wants to bring. It is obvious that he is totally fixated on Cordell. Sterling, Ortiz, and Peyton were just proxy, and their killings were just for surrogate satisfaction. Dr. Bonnie Gillespie, another criminal psychologist, leads the " bag-and-donkey theory ." As an example, he cites the murderer Edmund Kemper , who killed a number of hitchhikers but always saw his dominant mother as the real target. He saved these until the very end and killed them in a particularly horrific way. Dr. Catherine Cordell is already crazy with fear. She is the only living connection between her tormentor at the time and the surgeon. Nevertheless, she refuses to tell the police what actually happened to Andrew Capra that night. She only gives the investigator Moore to understand that Capra must have had an "abysmal hatred" for her. Moore, who lost his wife to a tragic illness, feels connected to Catherine through the pain. Nina Peyton regains consciousness, she can be extubated and describe the course of events in fragments, insofar as she had noticed. However, the face of the perpetrator was covered by a surgical mask. She remembers that he had told her to remove her filthy and stained organ (her uterus, which he had soiled himself from his previous rape). It becomes clear that the smell of her fear must have been something like the surgeon's elixir of life. Before Nina Peyton can make any further statements, a so-called “ Blue Code ” is triggered. Dr. Cordell has to rush to another patient, where she struggles in vain for his life.
The surgeon, who has apparently been in the hospital the entire time and has access to Dr. Cordell used the time of general confusion and distraction to break into Nina's room and brutally butcher her and the policeman guarding her. In addition, he leaves a card with birthday greetings from AC (Andrew Capra) in Catherine's room. Although Rizzoli is aware that a testimony under hypnosis is not admissible as evidence in court, she agrees that Catherine be hypnotized to restore her to her pre- and post-crime state. The forensic hypnotist takes Catherine back to her happy childhood memories for complete relaxation. He gets her to board a boat on a beautiful and sunny summer day and go on a journey to the stations of her life. She gets out of the boat on another bank and enters a house in which the cinema screen of her life is set up. Catherine can lean back comfortably in an armchair and watch her biography from a distance. She has the option of fast-forwarding or rewinding to certain events. She gets back to the moment when Andrew Capra knocks on the door of her home in Savannah. Capra seeks a discussion with her to discuss his mistakes in the hospital. His career depends on Catherine's decision. Then she falls asleep. In the next sequence, she experiences the rape again. The hypnotist has to stop because Catherine's arousal reaches a critical point. The memories are severely clouded by the effects of Rohypnol and continue to fail. She remembers a scalpel and how she shoots Capra in the stomach with her father's pistol. In the next scene, police officers enter the crime scene. The decisive moment is not disclosed. Nevertheless, they manage to rewind to the moment in which Catherine lies naked and tied up on the bed. She hears the rushing of water in the pipe and how Capra tells another unknown person that it is " very easy ".
Jane Rizzoli is invited to her parents' home. She is jealous of Moore, who is with Catherine right now and maybe even sleeping with her. Furthermore, she is jealous of her brother Frank Junior, who gets all of her parents' attention. “... the macho elite soldier always played war. She had to go into battle every day, against real people, against real killers. "Then she receives a call from the Boston Police Department that a DNA comparison has identified the murderer of Nina Peyton and is about to storm his house. It is a certain Karl Pacheco who comes into question as the perpetrator. However, the suspect manages to escape and is shot dead by Jane Rizzoli while on the chase. However, no firearm is found during the examination of the body , so that doubts arise as to whether Rizzoli actually acted in self-defense . Although they did not find any surgical accessories in the deceased's apartment, they did find large quantities of anesthetics. It turns out that Karl Pacheco was clearly her rapist from the sperm found in the smear of Nina Peyton's vagina , but not her murderer, the surgeon. Catherine is present at the autopsy of the sex criminal Karl Pacheco, but asserts that she does not know the man. The hypnotist admits that memories can be rewritten to meet our expectations. A copycat or a partner of Andrew Capra is now being sought. Also, Kenneth Bianchi and Henry Lee Lucas had their partners who committed the murder together. The hunt for women together would eventually be more efficient.
Rizzoli discovers that prior to Elena Ortiz's murder, the Boston Globe had a report and photo of Dr. Catherine Cordell appeared, making the impression not of a vulnerable victim but that of a very self-confident conqueror. Something that may have scared and enraged the surgeon. He probably wants to reduce her to his level in order to deal with her. Meanwhile, Moore has sex with Catherine. His boss, Marquette, notices that his subordinate has got involved with a witness and orders that he cut off contact with her immediately while the investigation is in progress. Catherine feels very hurt by the breakup. Moore receives the order to continue the investigation in Savannah. There he goes in search of traces in Andrew Capra's life. He rolls up the murder cases of Dora Ciccone, Lisa Fox, Ruth Voorhees and Jennifer Torregrossa again. Capra killed Ciccone while studying medicine there in Atlanta . His first act was still relatively “amateur” and the cuts that he inflicted on the young woman testify to great uncertainty. The traces are poor. Capra's house burned down. But in the evidence room of the local police, Moore finds old footage of Capra's house and the crime scenes.
In his fridge they find the victims uterus. When combing out the pubic hair of the murder victim Dora Ciccone, they found the male pubic hair of the perpetrator. It is noticeable that it is light brown “bamboo hair ” ( Trichorrhexis invaginata ) and that the perpetrator probably suffers from Netherton's syndrome , a disfiguring skin disease. Moore is sure this is the surgeon. So Capra's partnership began with the first murder in Atlanta. The teacher Capra was probably worshiped like a god by him. The surgeon delights in human blood , works in a medical laboratory and also has the option of accessing patient files without being noticed. Also of the diagnosis of rape , which for him is the key to killing the woman. For him it is the blood of a wounded animal, which is just waiting to be torn from him. Moore travels to Emory University in Atlanta, where Capra studied medicine. His research leads him to the secretariat, where he is described as a polite, absolutely inconspicuous and good boy. He has the vintage photos from that time shown and uses some inconsistencies to track down Warren Hoyt. When asked, the secretary refers to Dr. Kahn, since it's a private matter. Dr. Kahn is uncomfortably touched by the subject and finally tells the inspector that he had caught Hoyt tearing out the bladder and uterus of a female corpse in the anatomy room in order to masturbate. He is then expelled from the university. Moore also finds out that Andrew Capra was his lab partner.
In her apartment, Catherine receives a message from the clinic headquarters that she would like to meet a certain Ivan Gwadowski. Ivan is the son of a deceased who accuses the doctor of having contributed to the death of his father. Cordell had to perform emergency surgery on Gwadowski when Nina Peyton was killed at the same time. Before Catherine wants to drive to the agreed meeting point, she is overwhelmed with chloroform by Hoyt, who had been waiting for her inside her car. The department searches Hoyt's workplace and discovers that he used his computer as a kind of “fish pond” to find his victims. The blood analysis reveals the most intimate secrets, for example whether someone has leukemia or AIDS . The laboratory is his hunting ground, not the street as the officials mistakenly believed. Hoyt was born in Houston , is the child of wealthy parents and trained as an MTA after dropping out of college . Except for the incident in the anatomy room, there were no warning signs of his mental illness beforehand. Outwardly he looked perfectly normal to everyone.
Capra and Hoyt were hunters and "blood brothers". They traveled together to distant countries and formed the “perfect” team. When Cordell killed Capra, a world collapsed in Hoyt. The surgeon kidnaps the helpless Catherine to the lonely Sturdee farm near Boston, where she can be tortured and murdered undisturbed. She is again naked and tied up on a stretcher. When she asks the killer for a glass of water, she manages to free an arm and injure Hoyt. However, she is overwhelmed again in the scuffle that ensues. Catherine resolves to under no circumstances be able to triumph over the perpetrator, to exercise absolute power over him and to surrender to her fear. She provokes and insults her opponent with allusions to his impotence , which leads him to no longer save his act, but to kill her directly in his anger . Meanwhile, Rizzoli gets to feel more and more from her team that she is no longer wanted and that her colleagues are massively bullying her for killing Pacheco. She sees her only chance at rehabilitation in hunt down the surgeon whose identity she now knows. The trail leads her to the Sturdee farm, where she discovers Catherine's Mercedes and a wig . The surgeon had partially disguised himself as a woman in order to better get to his victims. She discovers the cellar and jars of uterus with the names of the women from whom they were taken.
Finally she discovers Catherine, who already has deep cuts in her stomach and which she initially thinks to be dead. It is a trap. Hoyt attacks her and manages to nail her to the floor with several scalpels that he sticks in her hands. Finally, Hoyt is struck down with one shot. Rizzoli, Cordell and Hoyt are admitted to hospital. The last scene of the book belongs to the perpetrator, who is in prison and longs for Catherine with whom he wants to bring his perverse act of love to an end. A guard had slipped him a newspaper clipping that said Moore had married Cordell. He goes into his sick fantasies , which, in his opinion, make him something very special.
people
Jane Rizzoli
Jane Rizzoli is the only woman on the homicide squad. You can tell that since her earliest childhood her parents viewed her as inferior to her brother. This is reflected in their overall behavior.
Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore is a cool, laid back cop who is very much respected by Rizzoli. He lost his wife to cancer and still does not seem to get over this loss.
Dr. Catherine Cordell
Dr. Catherine Cordell is a young, beautiful, determined doctor. However, since an attempted murder of her she has been very withdrawn and withdrawn in private and also suffers from anxiety.
Andrew Capra
Mr. Capra was a medical student at the University of Dr. Cordell worked and was looked after by her. He is a serial killer who killed four women while trying to find Dr. Cordell was reportedly shot dead by her.
Warren Hoyt
Warren Hoyt is the surgeon. The mentally ill man suffering from a skin disease began his “career” with fellow student and “blood brother” Andrew Capra at the Emory School of Medicine. After he had to drop out of his medical studies, he managed to spy on his victims as a laboratory assistant using blood analyzes.
linguistic style
The story is told from multiple perspectives. The narrator switches between the perspectives of the investigator, Dr. Cordell, various other victims and partly also the murderer. The narration always remains in chronological order. In the story the streams of thought / consciousness of the perpetrator are shown again and again. For example, he feels like Odysseus , who is tied to his ship and wants to resist the singing of the sirens . On another occasion he puts himself in the position of Agamemnon , who sacrifices her daughter Iphigenia . A third image is the brutal sacrifice of a slave on the occasion of a burial of a Viking chief in 922 AD. Another sequence visualizes the thoughts of the perpetrator, who traveled to Mexico City especially to study the Aztec culture of sacrifice , in particular what techniques they had acquired to expose the human heart and sacrifice to their gods. He gets drunk on human blood and misses his soulmate.
“ Moore had been prepared for the sight, but when he saw the victim for the first time, it hit him like a punch in the pit of his stomach. The woman's black hair was covered with blood and protruded from her head like spikes; the face was the color of blue-veined marble. Her lips were slightly parted, as if frozen in the middle of a word. The blood had already been washed off her body, and her wounds gaped as purple tears in the gray canvas of the skin. There were two visible wounds. One was a deep incision in the neck that cut the left carotid artery and exposed the cartilage of the larynx. The coup de grace. The second cut was in the lower abdomen. The injury was not done with the intention of killing her. It had served a very different purpose. "
“ Rizzoli pulled her hand out of the wound. A small drop of blood had stuck to the inside of her glove; it looked like a shining red pearl. "How skilled is he?" "Are we dealing with a doctor?" "Or with a butcher? "
Gerritsen's language is explicit, expressive and unmistakable.
Position in literary history
Classification in the work of the author
Tess Gerritsen started writing while on maternity leave . In 1987 she published her first novel 'Call after Midnight'. After completing a few more works, the Maura Isles & Jane Rizzoli series began in 2004 with 'Die Chirurgin' . Since then she has released ten other thrillers in the series.
Impact history
The novels of the Maura-Isles - & - Jane-Rizzoli series are the basis for the series Rizzoli & Isles , which has been broadcast in the USA since 2010 and celebrated its German premiere on March 14, 2012 on VOX. In the series, Jane Rizzoli is starred by Angie Harmon and Dr. Maura Isles portrayed by Sasha Alexander .
reception
The novel has received mostly positive reviews. In 2002 Gerritsen received the RITA Prize for the best novel in the Suspense genre, making her international breakthrough. The author Tess Gerritsen is a trained internist and therefore understands her craft from the human anatomy . The plot, held in a gloomy atmosphere, is extremely cleverly constructed, coherent, coherent and unpredictable, and is based on an authentic depiction of the everyday life of a surgeon in modern hospital life as a second storyline, as well as the lively characters Rizzoli, Moore and Cordell, which are modeled down to the smallest detail . Jane Rizzoli, for example, is the only woman on the Boston homicide squad and is therefore constantly exposed to the prejudices of her male colleagues. The subject of female assertion in a tough male job compared to testosterone overloaded competition becomes very clear. Jane finds little support even in her family, as her father and mother mainly focus on her brother, a professional soldier. The projection of the serial perpetrator, on the other hand, appears less successful, since his trains of thought are only separated by streams of consciousness printed in italics and are not easy for the reader to understand. He justifies his deeds, which arise from his perverse fantasy, with motifs from Greek mythology. He also shows an abnormal passion for human blood. The question of whether he uses the forcibly removed uterus as a trophy remains largely unanswered. The story contains various surprising twists and turns and cliffhangers and keeps the reader largely under tension. The characters are precisely described and depicted in a credible manner. The tragic fate of Dr. Catherine Cordell inspires the reader to great empathy. In her detective novel, Tess Gerritsen shows an explicit depiction of violence, which, however, does not serve the primitive showmanship but the background of the tense story and offers insights into human fates and psychological abysses. SPIEGEL writes of a disgusting series of murders in an exciting medical thriller that is “ not suitable for mimosas ”. Gerritsen's novels are written with stylistic elegance and reflect deep human fears. The mainspring for the author's bloodthirsty plots is said to be the “ability of man to be evil”. The book is considered by many as a page turner, which describes the subject of raped women as well as the inner workings of mentally disturbed sex offenders.
literature
Text output
- Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon . Blanvalet, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-36067-6 (Original title: The Surgeon . Translated by Andreas Jäger).
Web pages
Notes and sources
- ↑ a b c d e “Refined Plot Construction”, Tess Gerritsen: The Surgeon, Crime Couch, by Michael Matzer ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon. Blanvalet, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-36067-6 , p. 173
- ^ Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon. Blanvalet, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-36067-6 , p. 251
- ↑ "The Banality of Evil"
- ↑ A chief burial of Ibn Fadlān
- ^ Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon. Blanvalet, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-36067-6 , p. 9
- ^ Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon. Blanvalet, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-36067-6 , p. 15
- ↑ http://www.fernsehserien.de/rizzoli-and-isles
- ↑ http://www.vox.de/cms/sendung/rizzoli-and-isles/darsteller.html
- ↑ a b c d Rizzoli & Isles crime series on line cinema
- ↑ a b bestseller by Tess Gerritsen about Rizzoli & Isles as a TV series, the background story is based on the novel "The Surgeon". Blog from March 9, 2012 ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d e f g Book review Tess Gerritsen: The surgeon by Claudia Bett ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Tess Gerritsen: "The Surgeon". from the American by Andreas Jäger, Limes Verlag, Munich, 416 pages, crime thrillers, DER SPIEGEL, October 7, 2002
- ↑ Doctor as a crime star. The Chinese-born US author and ex-internist Tess Gerritsen delights the German audience with her new thriller “Sister Murder”. DER SPIEGEL, October 4, 2005
- ↑ The Surgeon (Tess Gerritsen); Volume 1 of the Rizzoli & Isles Thriller, Reader World, The Literature Portal, by Viola Ebner
- ↑ The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen, page after page Blog
