Eglin's second English Garden mystery is a delightful amateur sleuth tale that works on two levels, a superb whodunnit cozy and a fabulous look at gardening. However the stars of this superb British mystery are the gardens, as Anthony Eglin takes readers on a delightful tour filled with flowers, weeds and corpses.
Hidden within the derelict gardens of abandoned Wickersham Priory, a deadly secret is waiting. But when an unsuspecting young Californian named Jamie Gibson finds herself the new owner of the estate, through a surprise bequest from a total stranger— the secret begins to stir.
Jamie, fired with enthusiasm to restore the gardens to their 1930’s glory, seeks the help of Lawrence Kingston, a retired professor of botany, eccentric bon viveur and amateur sleuth. Lawrence soon unearths an old chapel, which leads to an ancient Healing Well, which in turn yields a human skeleton. And as the police pursue their inquiries, Kingston begins his own investigation—following a baffling trail of clues that wind through the centuries, from the battlegrounds of World War II to the depths of the Middle Ages.
It is a trail marked by misadventure, revenge, compassion and murder, and when Kingston finally unlocks the secret of Wickersham Priory, he and Jamie must confront a reckoning that neither of them could have ever imagined.
Excerpt
A crack of thunder woke him with start from his dream. For a few seconds, the room was harshly lit by a strobe of lightning. In the dream he had been alone in the dimly lighted living room at Wickersham. The room was as he remembered it, save for the pictures. Every surface of every table, the mantelpiece, the grand piano, even the window seats were stacked with framed photographs of varying shapes and sizes. All the head and shoulder sepia tone photos were identical⎯each of the same man, stern faced, and with humorless dark eyes that followed Kingston around the room. The man in the photo was wearing an army uniform with Major’s pips on each epaulette. Then Kingston heard Jamie’s desperate voice calling his name.
He sat up in bed sweating, a hand on the bed rail. He could hear his heart beating. He glanced at the chartreuse-lit numerals on the alarm clock. It was 3:20. Then another crash of thunder this time farther off. Now the rain was slapping against the open window, the curtain whipping like a flag. He slipped out of bed and went to the window. Reaching to close it, the rain soaking his forearm, he peered outside. It was too dark to see much at all. All he heard was the sheeting rain and the wind. He was about to return to bed when a far off flash of lightening illuminated the sky. In seconds it was dark again. But in that brief moment Kingston was certain he saw a shadowy figure retreating into the jungle, opposite. “That’s strange,” he whispered. The person’s head was covered with a hood, like a monk’s cowl.
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