Rizzoli & Isles

Tess Gerritsen was a physician before she wrote thrillers, and it shows in the autopsy suites and surgical detail of these novels. Starting with The Surgeon and The Apprentice, the books are darker and grittier than the show's banter-filled Boston, and the danger lands harder for it. The novels take turns centring on Jane or on Maura, so each woman gets room to be difficult and private in ways a weekly two-hander can't allow. Book Jane is a sharper, more abrasive cop who builds a marriage and a family under pressure. Book Maura is a solitary scientist more at ease with the dead, carrying a darker family inheritance than her TV counterpart. Their alliance is wary and earned, not easy, and that friction gives the partnership its tension. Viewers who know only the show will find most of these cases new, since the series used only the pilot's story from the books. A note on the list: The Shape of Night is a standalone ghost story, not part of the Rizzoli & Isles series, and I Know a Secret appeared after the show ended.

Book rivals turned TV best friends is the shortest way to put it. On screen, Jane and Maura share wine and talk about their love lives. In the novels they respect and rely on each other but are not especially friendly, and they often move in different circles. One reviewer argues the show also plays up a near-romantic dynamic between the two women that the books never had. Only the pilot, "See One, Do One, Teach One", adapts a novel directly. It squeezes the Hoyt copycat case from The Apprentice into a single episode, along with the killing of the killer's partner, the Dominator. After that the show mostly tells its own cases. No change to the ending of any specific book is documented, so the difference lies less in how stories resolve than in how loosely the series uses its source. The tone is much lighter and softer than the gritty novels, and most characters are nicer, toned-down versions of their book selves. Gerritsen has said her Maura is more of a loner with somewhat Asperger-like traits, while the TV Maura is more sociable. The leads' looks were effectively swapped, since book Maura is tall and lean, with pale skin and black hair. Maura's biological mother is a convicted murderer serving life in the books, but on TV she is a well-known scientist whom Maura gets to meet. Book Jane marries and has a child early in the series, which the TV Jane never does. The novels also alternate their focus between Jane and Maura, where every episode pairs them as co-leads.