''The Bone Garden'' is a 2007 novel written by

Tess Gerritsen Tess Gerritsen (born Terry Tom; June 12, 1953) is the pseudonym of Terry Gerritsen, an American novelist and retired general physician. Early life Tess Gerritsen is the child of a Chinese immigrant and a Chinese-American seafood chef. While grow ...

, loosely part of the Jane Rizzoli / Maura Isles series.

Plot summary

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

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

. In the present, recently divorced 38-year-old Julia Hamill, trying to plant a garden for her newly purchased rural

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

home finds a female

skull The skull is a bone protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of four types of bone i.e., cranial bones, facial bones, ear ossicles and hyoid bone. However two parts are more prominent: the cranium and the mandible. In humans, the ...

buried in the rocky soil. She contacts

medical examiner The medical examiner is an appointed official in some American jurisdictions who is trained in pathology that investigates deaths that occur under unusual or suspicious circumstances, to perform post-mortem examinations, and in some jurisdictio ...

Maura Isles who finds it scarred with the marks of murder but can discover no more due to the skull's age. In the past, Boston in 1830, Norris Marshall, a talented but poor student at Boston Medical College attempts to pay his college tuition by being a resurrectionist - one who plunders graveyards to sell the corpses on the

black market A black market, underground economy, or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by noncompliance with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the se ...

. 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 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 Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

immigrant Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...

seamstress named Rose Connolly who fears she may be the next victim, exacerbated by the need to protect her newborn niece Meggie. Rose, Norris and his classmate Oliver Wendell Holmes comb the city, from its grim cemeteries and autopsy suites to its glittering mansions and power centers, to track down the killer. Central to the plot is the condition of maternity wards at the time: doctors would often 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 (Meggie as an adult), 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, Holmes' final letter to Dr. Page, posted at the book's end, reveals that her aunt Rose survived the events, and never married.

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. *Kiziltan, Ayben. "The Bone Garden." (Jan. 2009). 2007 American novels 2000s horror novels Body snatching Chinese-American novels American horror novels American historical novels Novels set in Boston Fiction set in 1830 Novels set in the 1830s Literature by Chinese-American women {{2000s-horror-novel-stub