Tess Gerritsen

Tess Gerritsen is a Chinese-American novelist and retired physician, a Stanford graduate with an M.D. from UCSF, who started writing fiction while on maternity leave and published her first novel, Call After Midnight, in 1987. Her medical background became a genuine asset once she moved into thrillers: 1996's Harvest, a medical-conspiracy thriller, was her first New York Times bestseller and set the tone for the forensic, physician's-eye detail that runs through her best-known work. That work is the Rizzoli & Isles series: Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, blunt and working-class, paired against type with reserved medical examiner Maura Isles, introduced a book later and nicknamed the Queen of the Dead for her calm around corpses. Across thirteen novels, Gerritsen leans into genuinely dark, high-body-count medical-thriller territory, autopsy detail, disease and bioterrorism plots alongside straightforward serial-killer cases, anchored by real chemistry between her two leads. The series was loosely adapted into TNT's Rizzoli & Isles (2010-2016), which tells largely original stories rather than following the books directly. New readers should start with The Surgeon, though Isles herself doesn't appear until book two, The Apprentice. Since 2023, Gerritsen has shifted focus to a new series, The Martini Club, following a circle of retired CIA officers in coastal Maine, reportedly inspired by discovering several of her own neighbors were former intelligence officers.