The Bone Garden » (Reprint)

Tess Gerritsen is a physician and an internationally bestselling author. She gained nationwide acclaim for her first novel of medical suspense, the New York Times bestseller Harvest. She is also the author of the bestsellers The Bone Garden, The Mephisto Club, Vanish, Body Double, The Sinner, The Apprentice, The Surgeon, Life Support, Bloodstream, and Gravity. Tess Gerritsen lives in Maine.

Recent divorcee Julia Hamill has sunk her dwindling life savings into a 200-year-old farmhouse and a twenty-acre plot of woods, fields, and stony soil in rural Massachusetts, where she hopes to recover from her failed marriage. Gardening one afternoon, her spade strikes something hard and unyielding'not a rock, but a human skull. Boston medical examiner Maura Isles quickly determines that this is no recent burial. The skeleton'that of a woman'dates back to the early 1800's, and the forensic evidence indicates foul play. "But too much time has passed," Maura warns Julia. "We'll never know the whole story."

* * *

Boston, 1830: It is an age of disease and pestilence, when doctors with unclean hands unknowingly spread infection as they make their rounds in maternity wards, condemning women to the excruciating death of childbed fever. It is an age when laboring mothers are crammed two to a hospital bed, on dirty sheets still encrusted with the foul effluvia of those who have...

Publishers Weekly

At the start of this disappointing stand-alone thriller from bestseller Gerritsen (The Mephisto Club), 38-year-old divorcée Julia Hamill discovers a skeleton buried in the garden of the Boston house she's just moved into; the ring found with the remains was in fashion in the 1830s, the fractured bones suggest murder. Flashback to 1830: medical student Norris Marshall, an outcast among his wealthier classmates, meets Rose Connolly in a Boston maternity ward, where Rose's sister recently died of childbirth fever. When several gutted bodies turn up in deserted alleyways, Rose and Norris are the only ones to catch a glimpse of the killer, dubbed the West End Reaper. Norris, Rose and Norris's fellow student, Oliver Wendell Holmes, race to uncover the truth behind the slayings, which will remind many of Jack the Ripper's crimes. In the present, Julia is able to trace their progress with the help of a relative of the house's former owner. Unfortunately, neither the present nor the historical story line maintains the suspense necessary for a whodunit spanning several generations. (Sept.)