Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner
The Garden Tour Affair
Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Ann Ripley
Class/Genre: Mystery Amateur Sleuth Woman Main Character Cozy
Series: Louise Eldridge # 4
Bantam, Jan 1999, $22.95, 320 pp.
Public TV hostess, Louise Eldridge, accompanied by her family and friends, travels to Connecticut to tape a TV show on the Litchfield Gardens. While preparing for the show, one of the other guests staying at the same inn as Louise, Professor Freeling, a botany genetics expert, falls off a mountain summit. Another guest, Grace, is found dead, an apparent suicide.
Louise and her contingent begin to investigate whether the two deaths were actually murder. Louise cannot accept that Grace would kill herself just when she seem to have so much to live for with a poem to be published and a love garden just built near her Brooklyn home. Before she leaves for her Virginia home, Louise strongly feels that she must ferret out the identity of the culprit who murdered her fellow garden lover.
This is the fourth novel of the well written Eldridge, amateur sleuth series. The previous three novels (DEATH OF A POLITICAL PLANT, DEATH OF A GARDEN PEST, and MULCH) were all fun to read, but this tale, THE GARDEN TOUR AFFAIR, is the blooming best of the bouquet because the mystery is so complex. Fan of gardening have the added bonus of simple, educational and enjoyable essays interspersed hroughout the book. Those readers not in interested in horticultural activities, can easily skip the sections and solely focus on the enjoyable mystery. The large cast of characters is deftly handled by Ms. Ripley so that readers will not confuse the identities of any of them. The who-done-it is complex and the red herrings are well designed to fool the reader. "A rose is a rose" when the who-done-it is written by Ann Ripley.
Harriet Klausner
Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner
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