Lifeline

April 1, 2020
Murder disrupts a gardening group. Ever since the murder of her imperious mother, Lady Swynford, Ruth Harvey has tried to make Frog End Manor a more welcoming place to the locals. She expands the annual summer f�te with a host of child-friendly activities and opens her greenhouse to the public, selling indigenous plants to all comers at a modest price. And when her physician husband, Tom, recognizes that sometimes hard work and socialization can be more therapeutic than pills, Ruth even invites some of his needier patients to volunteer in her garden, potting seedlings, deadheading roses, and, most importantly, getting out of their empty houses to spend time with others. The bond she forged with Jacob, her reclusive landscaper, has given Ruth experience dealing with the mentally fragile. Now her kindness and persistence, along with the exercise of pruning, help Lawrence Deacon recover from a stroke. Widowed Tanya Carberry finds the world a less lonely place when she can help customers select plants. Even Johnny Turner, paralyzed as a teenager in a motorcycle crash, is a little less surly toward his mum when he learns to keep Ruth's seedlings healthy and well watered. But the discovery of a body in the greenhouse threatens to undo all the gains her amateur gardeners have made. Worse yet, Inspector Squibb has decided that Jacob must be the killer. In desperation, Ruth turns to the Colonel, Frog End's unofficial sleuth. With the help of his drinking buddy Naomi Grimshaw, ever vigilant Freda Butler, and Freda's swastika-embellished war-souvenir binoculars, the Colonel cracks the case. Crime and clues enhance this village charmer.

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April 13, 2020
Mayhew’s leisurely sixth Village mystery (after 2016’s Bitter Poison) focuses on the inhabitants of Frog End, England, many of whom have settled into quiet retirement. Much of the narrative dwells on the meetings of the Frog End Ladies’ Group (“Not a soul under sixty-five and the speaker forgot to turn up”), preparations for the village fete (“The committee meetings were very long and very tedious”), musings on the benefits of gardening therapy, and memories of past village murders. Ruth Harvey, owner of the village manor, earns a bit of cash by propagating plants in the estate’s dilapidated greenhouses. Her husband, Tom, the local doctor, decides gardening therapy will be just the ticket for some of his patients, who include a hypochondriac, a wheelchair-bound teenager, and a bored retiree. A murder doesn’t occur until well over halfway through the book, which allows Mayhew plenty of time to show the disagreeable victim really had it coming. Detection is minimal. Cozy readers more interested in daffodils than detection will best appreciate this one.

May 15, 2020
Frog End is anything but a stereotypically quiet English village?not with a populace of eccentric characters and a track record as a murder scene. But things have to have quieted down since the last murder (Bitter Poison, 2016). The most interesting development is that the local doctor has recommended that some of his patients?who seem fine physically but who are lonely, troubled, or both?should try working in the gardens of the local manor. It's a motley collection of characters who take up this lifeline ?a recent widow, a man recovering from a stroke, a woman whose husband is never home, and a young man who's been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. But when one of the amateur gardeners is brutally murdered, it's time for the redoubtable Colonel, Frog End's resident amateur sleuth, to find out whodunit. The rather sad ending aside, Mayhew's latest is a delightful British cozy, exuding warmth and charm along with the inevitable murder most foul.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)