‘The Bone Garden’ by Tess Gerritsen
Published by Bantam Press. January 2008.
ISBN 978-0-593-05778-0

As I have indicated in earlier reviews,  I do enjoy reading Tess Gerritsen's crime novels and find it impossible to put them down.  The Bone Garden has a slight association with medical examiner,  Maura Isles, who has only a brief appearance in this book before the most compelling part of the story goes back for its main events to the 1830s. Apart from two letters dated 1888, written to Margaret by O.W.H. to start and finish the book,  the story has two time zones,  one in "the present" the other in the 1830s.  Events start in the present, when Julia Hamill, digging in the garden of her old house in rural Massachusetts strikes a hard object with her spade which, uncovered, proves to be, not a stone, but a human skull.  The discovery of the rest of the skeleton and examination by Maura Isles, dates the bones as belonging to the early 1800s.

The action then moves to Boston Medical Centre in the 1830s which at that time is a disease-ridden place.  In the hospital, a young patient is giving birth to her first child accompanied particularly by her seventeen-year-old sister, Rose Connolly.  The description of conditions and treatment in the maternity ward are given with all the horrifying details which one associates with Gerritsen and which the reader feels are frighteningly accurate. The mother dies as a result of purpureal fever, the symptoms being described with clarity, leaving Rose to cope with the new-born daughter and with the mystery,  which it is now clear surrounds her conception and birth.  It is a mystery which also involves a medical student, Norris Marshall.  Details are also given of the trade in dead bodies, supplied to medical centres by resurrectionists, to further the study of human anatomy.

In addition to the story  behind the baby's birth are other happenings, the most sensational of all involves the shadowy figure of a murderer who cuts the victims' bodies in a particular pattern and whom the press of the time name The Grim Reaper.  The identity of the Reaper provides the chief mystery together with the reason for the murders taking place.  From time to time the events return to happenings in Massachusetts. The book concludes with the two stories, present and past being linked, predictably of this writer, in a convincingly satisfactory manner.

The novel is also tied to real life by the character of one of the medical students, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, after studying medicine in Paris, returned to Boston and gave a paper on the cure for purpureal fever, from which many female patients died after giving birth.  The cure was simple, that surgeons should wash their hands before officiating at child birth and not go straight from cutting up dead bodies to delivering babies.
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Rosemary Brown