The Bone Garden

"The Bone Garden" is a 2007 novel written by Tess Gerritsen, loosely part of the Maura Isles/Jane Rizzoli series.

Plot introduction

This book delves into Boston's past (1830), with Maura Isles playing a cameo role in present-day Boston.

Plot summary

Present day: Recently-divorced 38-year-old Julia Hamill, trying to plant a garden to her newly-purchased rural Massachusets home finds a female skull buried in the rocky soil. She contacts medical examiner Maura Isles who finds it scarred with unmistakeable marks of murder--but can proceed no further due to the skull's age.

Boston, 1830: Norris Marshall, a talented but poor student at Boston Medical College attempts to pay his college tuition by being a "resuurectionist" - one who plunders graveyards to sell the corpses on the black market. When two nurses are found murdered (one on the hospital grounds) as well as a respected doctor, Norris is considered as the prime suspect; he has had a glimpse of the killer at the second (nurse) murder scene.

Norris, attempting to clear himself, attempts to track down the only other witness to have caught a glimpse (at the first murder scene), a beautiful 17-year-old Irish immigrant seamstress named Rose Conolly - who fears she may be the next victim, exacerbated by the need to protect her newborn neice Meggie (Rose's sister Aurnia died giving birth to Meggie--and unknown to Rose, Aurnia's body has been plundered). Rose, Norris and his classmate Oliver Wendell Holmes comb the city, from its grim cemeteries and autopsy suites to its glittering mansions and power centres, to track down the killer.

Central to the plot is the condition of maternity wards at the time: doctors would oft walk in from the autopsy area to the "lying-in" wards, and handle the women without using even gloves (let alone antisepsis, which Holmes later suggested) putting the women at higher risk of childbirth deaths than if they had given birth attended by midwives, or even unattended.

Julia and 89-year-old Henry Page, a descendant of one of Boston's first female doctors--Margaret Tate Page--piece through letters written by Holmes to Dr. Page about the case to find out more about the murders and piece together the facts--for Julia, the driving question is if the victim is Rose (spoiler: Holmes' final letter to Margaret Page reveals otherwise).

References

*"The Bone Garden." Publishers Weekly 254.32 (13 Aug. 2007): 46-46.
*"THE BONE GARDEN." Kirkus Reviews 75.17 (Sep. 2007): 880-880.
*Pitt, David. "The Bone Garden." Booklist 104.1 (Sep. 2007): 4.