The Hemlock Cup

Little Hemlock is the prettiest village in the county — three years running the Best-Kept sign stands at the green's edge — and it is named, if you read the map honestly, after a poison.

Dilys Ashcroft, sixty-four and nearly two years widowed, has only just stopped keeping a light burning in the greenhouse for her grief. The midsummer flower festival and the village's grand heritage pageant should ask nothing of her but bunting, lilies, and the pleasant labour of being fond of every foolish inch of the place again. Then Barnaby Gathercole — the insufferable, brilliant hedgerow forager who could tell hemlock from cow parsley at forty paces — drops dead of his own wild-herb dish, and the coroner sighs that even the great forager was caught out at last.

But Dilys knows plants the way other people know faces. She knows that a man who never made this mistake did not make it now. A death this precise is not carelessness. It is murder — arranged, like everything in Little Hemlock, to look pretty and finished and safe.

Then the festival trenching cuts into the water-meadow's rank far corner, the one the whole village has agreed for forty years never quite to look at, and turns up human bones. Slowly the loveliest lie in the parish — the young man who went abroad and never wrote again — begins to come apart.

To catch a poisoner hiding behind the church flowers, Dilys must dig where nobody wants her digging, past the fighting fund and the land-agent's rolled plans, past armour and pomp and forty years of village kindness, into the one corner everyone's eye has always slid away from.

Wry, tender, and richly rooted in the turning of an English summer, The Hemlock Cup introduces a detective who notices what others cannot help forgetting — and a village whose prettiness has always depended on nobody asking the right question.

Some things are buried on purpose.