In 1830's Boston, a young medical student and a poor Irish girl team up to find a killer.
Ballantine Books
August 2008
On Sale: July 29, 2008
Featuring: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Rose Connolly; Norris Marshall
512 pages ISBN: 0345497619 EAN: 9780345497611 Mass Market Paperback (reprint) Add to Wish List
Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery
on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a
skull buried in the rocky soil–human, female, and,
according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner
Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of
murder. But whoever this nameless woman was, and whatever
befell her, is knowledge lost to another time. . . .
Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education,
Norris Marshall, a talented but penniless student at
Boston Medical College, has joined the ranks of
local “resurrectionists”–those who plunder graveyards and
harvest the dead for sale on the black market. Yet even
this ghoulish commerce pales beside the shocking murder of
a nurse found mutilated on the university hospital
grounds. And when a distinguished doctor meets the same
grisly fate, Norris finds that trafficking in the illicit
cadaver trade has made him a prime suspect.
To
prove his innocence, Norris must track down the only
witness to have glimpsed the killer: Rose Connolly, a
beautiful seamstress from the Boston slums who fears she
may be the next victim. Joined by a sardonic, keenly
intelligent young man named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Norris
and Rose comb the city–from its grim cemeteries and
autopsy suites to its glittering mansions and centers of
Brahmin power–on the trail of a maniacal fiend who lurks
where least expected . . . and who waits for his next
lethal opportunity.