THE BONE GARDEN

Rippers, resurrection men, orphaned babies, innocent suspects: these are all in The Bone Garden. They are also all in past, as Tess Gerritsen's new novel looks to the Boston of the 1830s to discover how Julia Hammill has uncovered a woman's corpse in her overgrown garden today. However, this is not historical examination like Josephine Tey's The Daughter Of Time or Colin Dexter's The Wench Is Dead, although readers will discover a lot about medicine on the cusp of the modern age as Gerritsen takes her readers into the wards of a Boston maternity hospital where the germ theory of disease is unknown and a surgeon's hands carry pus from one dying mother to her neighbour. Instead, as a group of questioning young medical students, including the real Oliver Wendell Holmes, learn their trade and aspire to improve on it, one of them falls under suspicion as a ripper starts killing, first the nurses of the hospital and then threatening others out on the streets of Boston. Unfortunately for Norris Marshall, that suspect, he must be out late at night if he is to pay his way through college, and the way he earns his fees is as a resurrection man, digging up corpses and supplying them to the anatomy theatre of the same school in which he is studying. An alibi is not easy to come by under such nocturnal pressures. 

As the police ascertain that the corpse on Julia Hammill's property is not recent, they leave and the forensic archaeologists move in. Julia, who has wanted a garden to take her mind off her troubled marriage, now finds that she cannot escape thinking about her inconnue and her attention turns to the history of her house and its past residents. So Gerritsen continues swapping between the events of old Boston and Julia Hammill's researches, we readers inferring as go that some romance must be in the air, because there were generations after the murder time: someone must have been left to reproduce. However, there is not a lot of parallelism built up, and while the ripper murders and suspense build, the then and now elements do not really gain anything from each other. On the other hand, the final revelation of the identity of the corpse in the protagonist's garden does come as a surprise, though it has been honestly signalled.