Editor's Comments

This is a very special book in that it's the one Tess Gerritsen's always wanted to write. A page-turning thriller that turns round the premise of whose are the bones that Julia Hammill finds at the bottom of her garden, it also has a historical time frame that takes us back to Boston in the 1830s where a bigger and more shocking crime is unfolding.

And this is what has long fascinated Tess: the fact that in the early 19th century no one knew how germs were transferred. So surgeons in hospitals were coming from the autopsies of disease-ridden corpses into maternity wards where they examined and helped mothers give birth - often without washing their hands. The consequence was that new mothers in those days died in their thousands from an agonising disease known as 'child-birth fever' - and no one knew that this fever was being spread by the very people who were supposed to be saving lives.

No one had made this connection, until a young surgeon called William Halstead Osler appeared on the scene - and this is where The Bone Garden opens. It's a terrific novel with all the hallmarks one has come to expect from Gerritsen - gruesome autopsies, knife-edge suspense, and an unexpected denouement that makes you gasp out loud. But it is also a fascinating novel that you put down feeling you've learned something about the past that makes you look at modern medicine with different eyes - and give thanks that you weren't alive in the 1830s ...