Earlsacre Hall (in Devon) has recently been sold to a charitable trust with an eye of turning the entire estate into an art centre. And one of the first projects is to restore the seventeenth century garden to its former glory. The escavation and restoration work is going swimmingly until the workers make an unsettling find: the remains of a woman who had been buried alive in the garden almost 300 years ago. Naturally the police are called in; and DS Wesley Peterson of Tradmouth CID finds himself becoming really intrigued by the find. A former archeology student, DS Wesley Peterson would rather like to get involved in solving the mystery of the woman's identity and why she was buried in the garden, but a current murder drags him away from the tantalizing find at Earlsacre: a young man is found brutally stabbed to death is his rented trailer nearby. Who he is and why he was murdered remains a mystery; but intriguingly a newspaper clipping about the escavation and restoration work going on at Earlsacre is found amongst his belongings. What is the connection between Earlsacre and the murdered young man? As the body count, both from the past and present mount, Peterson is determined to uncover this connection and to put an end to this current murderer's cold-blooded killings...

This is the fifth Wesley Peterson archeology murder mystery, and it is one of the better ones. Tightly woven and suspenseful from start to finish, I found it very hard indeed to put down "The Bone Garden" until I had reached the last page. Kate Ellis definitely knows how to spin a good yarn. I espeically liked the manner in which she blended the 300 year old mystery with the current one practically seamlessly. Colourful, vivid and terrfically engrosing, "The Bone Garden" definitely was a fantastic read, and one that should not be missed by any avid mystery fan.