The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen ****

A serial killer is on the loose in Boston. The victims are killed in a particularly nasty way: cut with a scalpel on the stomach, the intestines and uterus removed, and then the throat slashed. The killer obviously has medical knowledge and has been dubbed "the Surgeon" by the media. Detective Thomas Moore and his partner Rizzoli of the Boston Homicide Unit have discovered something that makes this case even more chilling. Years ago in Savannah a serial killer murdered in exactly the same way. He was finally stopped by his last victim who shot him as he tried to cut her. That last victim is Dr Catherine Cordell, who now works as a cardiac surgeon at one of Boston's prestigious hospitals. As the murders continue, it becomes obvious that the killer is drawing closer and closer to Dr Cordell, who is becoming so frightened that she is virtually unable to function. But she is the only person who can help the police catch this copycat killer. Or is it a copycat? To complicate matters even further, Detective Moore, often referred to as Saint Thomas as he continues to mourn the loss of his wife, is getting emotionally involved with the doctor.

This book has languished at the back of my closet, unread for months.  I thought that it was a mystery-romance, heavier on the romance, so I was in no rush to read it.  The reason why I picked it up is because I just saw the show "Rizzolli and Isles" for the first time and quite liked it - and apparently the show is based on the series of books that started with this one.

This was a good, somewhat procedural, mystery novel.  I whipped through it in a couple of hours.  There were no big surprises, and I felt almost no connection to the main characters.  However, it was an easy, entertaining read.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ***

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.

The above description, which I had to do some searching for, is neither the one I read before I bought this book, nor the one on the back of the book.  It is, however, an accurate description of the story.  Maybe it was because I was expecting something else, but wasn't as impressed by it as I expected to be.  The Thirteenth Tale is a fairly good book, but I found it to be very dark and somewhat depressing.  

More than one person told me that they read it in a sitting, because they couldn't put it down.  While I didn't dislike it, it didn't hold my attention for very long.  I rarely read more than 20-30 pages before my mind started to wander, which is why it took me over two weeks to complete.  It wasn't a bad book, just not as good as I'd hoped.