The Glasshouse Murders

One flower blooms for a single night in a decade. By dawn, a man lies dead beneath it — and the only witness who cannot be fooled is a woman with a pencil in her hand.

Botanical illustrator Verity Pym has been summoned the breadth of England to remote Edenhall, a proud and perishing country house whose famous poison garden is the pride of its tyrannical master, Sir Aubrey Tarn. Her commission is a rare and monstrous prize: the midnight flowering of a titan arum, the towering corpse lily that heats itself like a fevered body and pours out the reek of death to call the flies across the dark. Verity expects a long cold vigil with her pencils and her aunt's steel watch, every study marked to the minute, a record you could stand a man's life on.

Instead, by morning, Sir Aubrey is dead at the foot of the bloom. His weak heart is blamed. The only road is buried beneath a fallen cedar, the telephone lines are down, and a household long crushed under his weight breathes out in relief. But Verity draws exactly what she sees, hour by careful hour — and her drawings do not match the story everyone is so eager to believe.

When a second death turns relief to terror, and a confession ties everything up far too neatly, Verity must read the crime the way she reads a specimen: precisely, patiently, and without flinching. Someone at Edenhall killed for the love of a living thing. Only the sharpest eye in the house can name them before her last chance withers for good.

A fair-play golden-age mystery in the finest classic tradition — a closed circle, a clever poison, a brilliant and unforgettable amateur sleuth, and every clue set honestly on the page. Written with wit, warmth, and a draughtswoman's exacting attention, The Glasshouse Murders invites you to look closer than the killer ever imagined you would.

Turn the first page. Start sketching the truth.