The Bone Garden

I've just finished reading Tess Gerritsen's The Bone Garden. Much as I'd like to compare it to her other work, I can't, because this is an historical piece. And what an excellent piece of work it is.

As an insight into 1830s Boston medical practices, it is gruesome, colourful, terrible, horror-filled and amazing. The setting could easily be England during the same period, or France. The book also touches on the attitude towards immigrants, particularly, the Irish.

It begins in the current day with the discovery of an old skeleton in a garden by the new owner of the house. From there, the reader is plunged into the 1830s where a seventeen-year-old girl struggles to protect her dead sister's newborn and survive the depredations of the time, while hiding from a most brutal killer.

Ms Gerritsen is highly descriptive of the medical practices which today fill the reader with revulsion and astonishment that one simply act - that of doctors washing their hands - could have saved so many from a drawn out and extremely painful death.

What I like about Tess Gerritsen's books is there is no guarantee of a happy ending; not in this book, nor in previous works. The ending stays true to the tale, to the characters, because in life, sometimes there isn't a happy ending. That's not a clue, by the way, merely an observation since I've read all her books and have them on my keeper shelves.

The only hint - if you can call it that - is the killer isn't who you expect, though the clues are there if you look close enough.

Tess Gerritsen weaves a tale of expectation; and you follow it all the way to the end only to find... well... you're wrong about the perpetrator.

To me, they're the best kind of books.