The Poison Garden

A year ago, the prettiest village in the county learned the truth about its own name. Now Little Hemlock is ready to celebrate — and to bury the past under bunting, marquees, and the glittering glass of a restored Victorian glasshouse that has brought the whole county flocking to Hemlock Manor.

But behind a long-bricked door in the great walled garden lies something older and stranger: an intact Victorian poison garden, its forbidden borders lovingly brought back to life, and among them a plant that has no business growing in England at all.

When Lucian Ferris — the celebrated, self-adoring man who restored it all — dies among those poisonous beds, the crowd murmurs about the heat and calls it a faint. Dilys Ashcroft knows better. Widowed, sharp, and quietly, unexpectedly happy again in a life rebuilt seedling by seedling, Dilys has spent a lifetime reading what clever men overlook. And she knows a faint when she doesn't see one.

To catch this last poisoner, she must decipher a bean that once judged the guilty, unearth a gift of land buried for forty years, and clear the very people the village is most eager to blame. The Manor has been saved by the restoration it is parading tonight — yet the family it saved stand in the glow like mourners at a wake, and Dilys files away every uneasy glance, because filing everything is a habit she can no longer deny.

Warm, wry, and steeped in the green and secret life of an English village, The Poison Garden is a mystery of gardens and grief, of old crimes and older loyalties, where every seedling passed over a hedge is a summons and every kindness carries a debt. One final reckoning will save the land, lay an old wrong to rest, and turn a place of death, at last, into a place of life.

If Dilys can read the poison first.