Ben's Bones

"Three can keep a secret... if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin

Crime is running rampant in turbulent 1760’s London. Pregnant women and children start vanishing from the city’s crowded streets and thieves are looting graves. Ramshackle police departments are unwilling—or unable—to stop the pillaging.

Benjamin Franklin arrives in London as Pennsylvania’s colonial agent to the Crown. He rents rooms from a lonely widow and her bright daughter Polly, who become his surrogate family while he is away from home. Franklin and Polly develop a deep friendship as he tutors her in many subjects, while he is busy trying to avoid open warfare between the British Empire and the American colonies.

Polly falls in love and, with Franklin’s blessing, marries William Hewson, a handsome and brilliant young doctor who is establishing a private anatomy school. Hewson has been business partners with the Hunter brothers—famous surgeons who acquire specimens for their own medical school in horrifying ways.

Hewson has discovered the extent of the Hunters’ depravities and their links to the underworld behind London’s crimes. He succumbs to temptation and ambition while building his own competitive academy. But when the Hunters cross a red line, he seeks justice from their mutual friend, Ben Franklin. Will the great luminary intervene—or is the Founding Father complicit in burying the victims’ bodies in his own garden?

In his exhilarating latest novel based on true events, Joseph C. Gioconda weaves a little-known historical tale about Ben Franklin’s life in London and the sinister origins of modern medicine into a suspenseful mystery and tragedy of epic proportions.