The Bone Garden, by Tess Gerritsen

TITLE: The Bone Garden
AUTHOR: Tess Gerritsen

COPYRIGHT: 2007
PAGES: 370
PUBLISHER: Bantam

SETTING: Present-day Massachusetts and 1830s Boston
TYPE: Mystery/thriller
SERIES: None

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.

This is one of those stories which mix the present with the past. It starts as, in the present day, recently divorced Julia Hamill discovers a skeleton buried in the gardens of her new house. It's an old one, a woman who clearly died violently, and Julia is intrigued by the mystery of who she might have been. And then she's contacted by an old man who was related to the former owner of the house, and who has a tonne of papers that could help find out more. Before long, Julia and her new friend are gleefully digging through them and discovering quite the story.

The story they unearth is what we spend most time on in the book, and it relates both to a serial killer called the West End Ripper, operating in 1830s Boston, and to the early life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (whom I confess I knew nothing about).

Our main characters in the 1830 storyline are Norris Marshall, a medical student, and Rose Connolly, a recently arrived Irish seamstress. They meet and become first friends, then something more, as each witnesses one of the West End Ripper's crimes. This brings them much attention by the police and suspicion that endangers them both. Rose is a penniless seamstress who's just been turned out of her home after the death in childbirth of her sister. She's desperate to keep her niece with her and alive. As for Norris, he's a bit of an odd one out amongst his peers, as he comes from a farming family and does not have money or connections. To be able to pay for medical school, he discreetly helps out the resurrectionist who keeps the school supplied with much needed corpses.

This was very promising, but it didn't quite deliver for me. There is some good stuff, in particular, learning about medicine at the time. That was very vivid and truly fascinating, and Gerritsen clearly has done her research.

The thing is, it felt like the history of medicine really was the main point of the book, with the actual story being more of an afterthought. I didn't find the characters or the plot particularly believable, with a lot of character actions and developments seeming to take place more to take the plot into a direction that would allow the author to explain a particularly fascinating nugget than to serve a story or be part of natural character development.

The present-day story was particularly pointless, with nothing really happening there. There are definite hints at first that there is some sort of mystery to solve in this storyline as well, some tension and danger, but all we really get is two people reading letters. It was just a framing device, nothing more.

Disappointing.

MY GRADE: A C+.