Bondi, spring 1946. Hazel Drummond, war widow and trained horticulturist, buys half of Barrow's garden shop from Nell Barrow, another man's widow. Garden work carries her into households at their moments of change, and gardens keep records: what was planted, when, and by whose hands. So when a death is closed too quickly and the official file lands on the wrong neck, the proof is in the ground. The hard part is making anyone believe a woman in work boots.
Warm, dry-witted, and rich in postwar detail, the eight Hazel Drummond mysteries run one per season from spring 1946 to winter 1948 — a complete series that pays off every thread it plants, from the shop partnership to a milkshake that takes eight books to become more. Deaths are discovered, never depicted. For readers of Jacqueline Winspear, Rhys Bowen, and Sulari Gentill.
The Books
Book 1
The Spring Garden Murder
Two cases, a dog and the last of the farm money. Her first Bondi job is a dead woman's garden, costed for the family in the parlour, and read from the gate before she touches a thing.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
The Summer Show Murder
December, and the show marquee goes up at Waverley Park: same fig, same platform, same timber as every year. Then a car comes onto the grass, and the constable at the caretaker's shed does up his top button.
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Book 3
The Autumn Planting Murder
A man from Bellevue Hill comes into the shop at a pace that has women stepping back from the trays, to say what the Courier's gardening man did in his glasshouse. Days later, that man is dead in a lane.
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Book 4
The Winter Fernery Murder
A block of flats on the hill buys twelve Thursdays of winter work, and eleven pots of maidenhair go up in the barrow. After a man dies of gas on a Wednesday night, every door on the stair is shut.
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Book 5
The Spring Wedding Murder
Three weeks to make a whole garden out of a bare block for a wedding. Nell has the arithmetic, and the name of the family paying for it is one the shop girl already knows and has not mentioned.
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Book 6
The Summer Memorial Murder
A quarter-acre the council has left doing nothing for twenty-two years is to be made into a memorial garden. Nine inches down, the trowel stops on brick that went into that ground as rubble, not as a wall.
Not yet on sale
Book 7
The Autumn Foxglove Murder
The Cathcart place runs two acres on the ridge above the beach, and the estate wants it fit for auction. In the shed, under the bench where a man leaves his boots, both have been cut open with a knife.
Not yet on sale
Book 8
The Winter Camellia Murder
Every Thursday for two years the Maybury house has been the best hour of Hazel's week. Then the passage pictures come down for the damp, and Bert walks in with his hat in both hands.
Not yet on sale
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