The Bone Garden is a dual-timeline historical mystery from Tess Gerritsen. In the present day, recently divorced Julia Hamill unearths a human skull while digging in the garden of the rural Massachusetts home she has just bought — the first thread in a case cold for more than a century. Documents left behind by the house's late former owner, brought to Julia by the woman's elderly cousin, pull the story back to Boston in 1830.
There, medical student Norris Marshall pays his tuition by grave robbing, and is drawn into a hunt for a killer stalking the wards of a Boston hospital after a woman is brutally murdered. With Rose Connolly, a seamstress and the only witness who glimpsed the killer, and a young Oliver Wendell Holmes at his side, Norris works to clear his own name before the murderer strikes again.
Gerritsen, herself a physician, grounds the historical strand in the grim realities of 1830s medicine — grave robbing, primitive surgery, and the era's obstetric dangers — while the present-day thread slowly uncovers how the two eras' bones are connected.