January 2011 Guest Editor Lisa Gardner on Tess Gerritsen...
While I’m a huge fan of her characters Rizzoli and Isles, my favourite novel remains The Bone Garden, a historic thriller that captures gruesome medical practices in the 1830s, when surgeons unwittingly cross-contaminated their patients and the demand for black market medical cadavers kept grave robbers in business. The Bone Garden is a thriller that both entertains and informs, my favourite kind of book.
A gruesome secret is about to be unearthed...When a human skull is dug up in a garden near Boston, Dr Maura Isles is called in to investigate. She quickly discovers that the skeleton - that of a young woman - has been buried for over a hundred years. But who was the woman? And how did she die? It is the 1930s, and an impoverished medical student, Norris Marshall, is forced to procure corpses in order to further his studies in human anatomy. It's a gruesome livelihood that will bring him into contact with a terrifying serial killer who slips from ballrooms to graveyards and into autopsy suites. And who is far, far closer than Norris could ever imagine...
Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and was awarded her M.D. in 1979. After completing her internal medicine residency, Tess worked as a physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.
While on maternity leave, she began to write fiction. On a whim, she submitted a literary short story to Honolulu Magazine’s statewide fiction contest¯and won first place!
In 1987, Tess`s first novel was published. She has now written 19 novels and is a Sunday Times bestseller. She also wrote a screenplay, ""Adrift,"" which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.
Having lived in Hawaii, she now resides in Camden, Maine, with her husband and two sons.
