The Bone Garden: A Novel
by Tess Gerritsen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tess GerritsenEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-29
ISBN: 0345497619
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of The Bone Garden: A Novel
Book Review: A solid, gripping historical mystery!
Summary: 4 Stars
Tess Gerritsen's "The Bone Garden" is a thoroughly entertaining, historical thriller that begins with the admittedly prosaic literary device of divorcée Julia Hamill finding a human skeleton buried in the back yard of her recently purchased century home in Boston. The local forensic examiner makes the determination that the skeleton was a female who had been brutally murdered over 100 years earlier. Naturally, Hamill's concern and curiosity is aroused. When a neighbour suggests she seek the help of an elderly relative of the former owner of the home who had kept boxes and boxes of old photos, newspaper clippings and personal correspondence, Julia finds herself enamoured with the story of the lives of the people from Boston's past and positively riveted with the possibility of finding the truth behind a murder that had taken place a century and a half ago.
The story, revealed to the reader in the form of flashbacks, alternates with the progress that Julia Hamill and her newfound elderly friend make in their historical researches into the history of the home and the family that owned it.
Norris Marshall is a medical student in 1830s Boston, a time when anatomy studies were carried out almost surreptitiously on cadavers supplied by less than scrupulous resurrectionists, more correctly known as grave robbers. He meets (and, of course, ultimately falls in love with) Rose Connolly, an Irish immigrant and the sister of a woman who died of childbed fever in the hospital where Marshall is studying. A gruesome killer, dubbed the West End Reaper by the journalists of the day, has begun to stalk the streets of Boston and Marshall and Connolly are the only witnesses to have caught a glimpse of the killer. But with single minded tunnel vision, the Boston constabulary come to believe that Marshall is the killer and Marshall's only hope for escape is to find the true killer before the police find him.
Aside from crafting a superb mystery, Gerritsen has also provided warm, romantic love story as well as a compelling and utterly convincing historical backdrop - 1830s Boston medical school, student life, ressurectionism, early feminism vs the standards of male chauvinism of the day, disease, filth, class distinctions, upstairs-downstairs, police practice, immigration, friction between Catholics (disparagingly called "Papists") and Protestants, and even the story of the grudging development of hand-washing as a standard practice in hospitals as knowledge of germs and their spread slowly grew out of infancy.
This is not the normal medical thriller genre that Gerritsen fans will have come to expect but it is good solid, gripping fiction - equal parts mystery, romance and history. Well done and easily recommended.
Paul Weiss
Summary of The Bone Garden: A Novel
Unknown bones, untold secrets, and unsolved crimes from the distant past cast ominous shadows on the present in the dazzling new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen.Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil?human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. But whoever this nameless woman was, and whatever befell her, is knowledge lost to another time. . . .
Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education, Norris Marshall, a talented but penniless student at Boston Medical College, has joined the ranks of local ?resurrectionists??those who plunder graveyards and harvest the dead for sale on the black market. Yet even this ghoulish commerce pales beside the shocking murder of a nurse found mutilated on the university hospital grounds. And when a distinguished doctor meets the same grisly fate, Norris finds that trafficking in the illicit cadaver trade has made him a prime suspect.
To prove his innocence, Norris must track down the only witness to have glimpsed the killer: Rose Connolly, a beautiful seamstress from the Boston slums who fears she may be the next victim. Joined by a sardonic, keenly intelligent young man named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Norris and Rose comb the city?from its grim cemeteries and autopsy suites to its glittering mansions and centers of Brahmin power?on the trail of a maniacal fiend who lurks where least expected . . . and who waits for his next lethal opportunity.
With unflagging suspense and pitch-perfect period detail, The Bone Garden deftly interweaves the thrilling narratives of its nineteenth- and twenty-first century protagonists, tracing the dark mystery at its heart across time and place to a finale as ingeniously conceived as it is shocking. Bold, bloody, and brilliant, this is Tess Gerritsen?s finest achievement to date.
"An old mystery is crossed with a modern story in the latest from Gerritsen (The Mephisto Club, 2006, etc.).Julia Hamill, newly divorced and still smarting, purchases an old house outside Boston. Determined to dig a garden, she instead finds the bones of a long-dead woman?the apparent victim of murder?which starts her on a journey to ferret out the story behind her death. Julia connects with Henry, a no-nonsense 89-year-old with boxes of documents that once belonged to the now-deceased previous owner of Julia?s home. The two discover a mystery dating back to the 1830s. At the heart of it is a baby named Meggie, born to the beautiful but doomed Irish chambermaid, Aurnia. Married to a man who cares nothing for her, Aurnia lays dying in a maternity ward with her sister, Rose, at her side. Rose, a spirited 17-year-old, takes Meggie to protect her from Aurnia?s husband, but soon finds herself the target of a bizarre manhunt. Someone is after the child?and Rose, as well, because she witnessed a horrifying murder. The body count piles up as Rose struggles to remain free of those who would take Meggie from her. Meanwhile, a young medical student becomes the chief suspect of the West End Reaper killings when he stumbles onto another terrible homicide. Although he fights the prospect, eventually he and Rose join forces to solve the murders and protect the baby at the heart of the mysterious deaths. Readers with delicate stomachs may find Gerritsen?s graphic descriptions of corpse dissection hard to take, but the story, which digs up a dark Boston of times long past, entices readers to keep turning pages long after their bedtimes."
- Kirkus Reviews (starred)
From the Hardcover edition.
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