Tess Gerritsen "Garden of Bones"

Author: Tess Gerritsen Title: The Garden of Bones Publication date: 2009 Julia Hamill, shortly after a painful breakup with her husband, impulsively buys a dilapidated old house. While working in the neglected garden, she discovers a skeleton bearing unmistakable signs of foul play. Soon, she is contacted by the cousin of the house’s last owner, who offers to help identify the remains. As we sift through old documents and letters, we are transported with them to Boston in the year 1830. We meet 17-year-old Rose Connolly, caring for her sister Aurna, who is giving birth in the maternity ward, and Norris Marshall, a first-year medical student, who has classes in the same ward. Their paths keep crossing, especially when the city is soon rocked by a wave of exceptionally brutal crimes committed by a killer known as the West End Angel of Death. Two nurses and a doctor who were present at little Meggie’s birth are murdered. Suspicion falls on Norris... "The Garden of Bones" is not only the moving story of Rose, an incredible girl willing to do anything for the people she loves. It is also a description of the early days of medical schools, illegal autopsies on corpses stolen from cemeteries, rampant puerperal fever, and surgeries performed without anesthesia... Terrifying, repulsive, but so very real.