The Lent Lily

The prettiest thing in England will kill you. Dilys Ashcroft has lectured on it for forty years: the Lent lily, the nodding gold daffodil of Mothering Sunday, is packed leaf and stem and bulb with poison — and a bulb, to anyone who wants it to, looks exactly like an onion.

Spring comes late and lovely to Little Hemlock, drowning the village in gold ahead of the Easter fête. But at the Women's Institute's Mothering Sunday luncheon, Beryl Verrall — the loudest woman in the parish and the fiercest voice against the developer at its gate — is taken ill over her own celebrated spring soup, and dead by nightfall. The county, comfortable as ever, blames a bad batch of onions and a poor tired heart.

Dilys knows better. A retired botanist and a widow still learning the shape of her own days, she understands precisely what grows in the churchyard, what it is made of, and what grief will do when it stops merely mourning. To catch a poisoner the whole village loved to fear, she must clear the frightened incomer the police would rather blame, read fifty springs of buried sorrow beneath the flowers, and win her own long, quiet fight for a dying walled garden before Thornfield Homes buries it in brick.

Written with the warmth and precision of the classic English village mystery, The Lent Lily moves at the pace of a countryside waking to spring — patient, observant, threaded with dry humour and a deep, aching tenderness for growing things and the people the village keeps but does not count. Here is a heroine who notices what everyone else steps past, in a place where the loveliest and the deadliest so often turn out to be the very same plant, grown from the very same soil.

Somebody ought, Dilys says to no one, and has no idea yet what she means by it.

By luncheon, she will.