Under the Yew

The prettiest village in the county has the deadliest name on the map — and this summer, Little Hemlock is going to earn it.

Two years a widow, retired botanist Dilys Ashcroft has, against every intention she ever formed and defended, come quietly back to life. There is a young detective to mentor, a dying walled garden to fight for, and a certain dry, prickly pathologist whose letters she keeps propped behind the clock so she won't have to look at them — and looks at a dozen times a day. At sixty-five, she has a diary, a dog, and a village full of other people's opinions. It is very nearly enough.

Then, in the heat of the scarecrow festival, as the old churchyard is turned over and its epitaphs read for the first time in a century, St. Anselm's tireless senior churchwarden drops dead in the shadow of the thousand-year yew. An old man's heart, everyone agrees comfortably — worn out by good work in a cruel summer. The whole parish mourns a man it calls a saint.

Dilys knows better. She knows the yew poisons everything but its own scarlet flesh. She knows Cuthbert Larch had been drinking something green and bitter from a churchyard flask all the long hot day. And she knows that a bitterness which stops the heart is not the same thing as a heart giving out.

With a developer buying friends on the parish council, human bones surfacing where forty executive homes are meant to stand, and a village that would far rather grieve than suspect, Dilys must prove that Little Hemlock's kindest death was its cruellest murder — and that mercy, in this valley, has always come packed inside menace, wearing the brightest colour it owns.

Warm, wry, and quietly devastating, Under the Yew is a classic English village mystery for readers who like their sleuths clever, their gardens deadly, and their secrets patiently, beautifully dug up.