Bitter Saffron

A village named for a poison. A judge dead over his ceremonial cup. And one woman who knows exactly what killed him.

Little Hemlock is the prettiest village in the county — honey-coloured cottages, a humpbacked bridge, best-kept village three years running. It is also, if you know your Latin and your churchyard weeds, the deadliest name on the map.

Dilys Ashcroft, sixty-four and fourteen months a widow, has folded herself away into her late husband's greenhouse, his disgracefully disobedient lurcher, and the particular grief of a woman who still makes only half the bed. She has let the world get on without her. Then, at the centenary Flower and Produce Show, the tyrant head judge drops dead over his ceremonial cup of saffron tea — and the whole village agrees, comfortably, that it was his weak heart and the tummy-bug going round.

Dilys knows better. She spent forty years as a botanist, and she can read a hedgerow the way other people read a newspaper. She knows the one thing no one else in Little Hemlock does: that what killed Gordon Purslowe was never saffron at all.

With a green young constable for her only ally and a whole community determined not to listen, this quietly underestimated plantswoman must trace a poison hidden in a jar of honey. But every border in the village is blooming with the same bare pink flower this September, every neighbour has a grievance the dead man had earned, and the gentlest soul in Little Hemlock is beginning to notice that the plant lady has noticed far too much.

Bitter Saffron is a cosy English mystery with real teeth — dry as a good gin, warm as a kitchen at half-six, and threaded through with the ache of starting again. For readers who like their murders traditional, their sleuths sharp, and their villages just a little too pretty to be safe.

Some things bloom out of season. Some of them are meant to.