August 19, 2023

Back to the Garden

Author: Laurie R. King
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2023
Pages: 336
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: A magnificent house, a vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: The Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.

And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home's past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.

Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate's young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents - monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.

Could the skull belong to one of his victims?

To Raquel-a woman who knows all about colorful pasts-the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.

Everything she finds keep bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.

But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob's brother, Fort.

The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case-before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.

Review: My reading challenge prompt this month, is a book you chose for the cover. I saw this on display at my library and the cover did grab my attention. I don't read many mysteries anymore, even though that was one of the first genres that hooked me on reading years ago - my mom gave me her collection of Nancy Drew novels.

This particular novel didn't exactly grab me so that I forgot the world around me, but it was good enough to keep me turning pages.

No comments:

Post a Comment