The Bone Garden
Tess Gerritsen, 2007
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345497611
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
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 Mephisto Club, Vanish, Body Double, The Sinner, The Apprentice, The Surgeon, Life Support, Bloodstream, and Gravity.
Gerritsen lives in Maine. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Equally fascinating and horrifying.... The pages seem to turn themselves.
Boston Globe
At the start of this disappointing stand-alone thriller from bestseller Gerritsen, 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.
Publishers Weekly
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
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Bone Garden:
1. Talk about the characters in this book. Do you feel the major ones are fully developed? How would you describe Rose Connolly and Noriss Marshall, for instance? What about the inclusion of the real-life character, Oliver Wendell Holmes?
2. The Bone Garden's historical story is framed by a modern story. Do you find the frame—Julia Hamill's story—as interesting, or less so, than the historical mystery? Did you enjoy the way the book moves back and forth between two time frames—or was it distracting for you?
3. Some readers feel the book's sections on autopsies are overly graphic. They are certainly not for the faint-of-heart. How do you view those passages, especially the one with the maggots leaping from the cadaver to the living person? Or the episode of the students-gone-wild when the professor leaves the room? Are those sections gratuitous (included for sensationalism) or do you find them necessary to the plot?
4. Has this book exposed you to the state of early modern medicine—its shortcomings...and the progress we've since made? What surprised you most about medical practices in the early 19th-century?
5. Talk about the class divisions in Boston in 1830. How does Gerritsen portray the differences between the Irish immigrant slums and the high society mansions—and, of course, the people who lived there? Are we as divided a nation today as we were nearly 200 years ago? Or have the class distinctions disappeared?
6. If you have time, do some research on the real Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh, Scotland, on which this mystery is based. How much does the author borrow from the real-life history...and how skillfully does she interweave the historical elements into her fiction?
7. Ultimately, does this book deliver? Did you find you find yourself reading compulsively, unable to put the book down? Were you surprised by the twists and turns of the plot? Or did you find it all rather predictable and/or manipulative? In other words, how did you experience the book?
8. Have you read other books by Tess Gerritsen? If so, how does this book compare to her others. If not, does this book make you want to read her other works?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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