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
Adelaide Waterhouse double-dug her beds for a spring the death certificate says she never planned to see, and her planting diary stops mid-sentence, still ordering October. The file is closed. The ground disagrees.
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Book 2
The Summer Show Murder
Minutes before judging, a limb drops from the show's old fig and kills the district's best-loved working man. Misadventure, say the police, until the gardener sent up to make the stage safe finds four inches of saw cut.
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Book 3
The Autumn Planting Murder
Twelve bulbs leave a Bellevue Hill glasshouse in a critic's handkerchief; six days later he is dead in a lane. His money and watch make the police property list. The bulbs are nowhere in New South Wales.
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Book 4
The Winter Fernery Murder
The coroner is right about everything except a fern. The maidenhair on the dead man's sill was stripped a fortnight before anyone knew to look, and the replacement carries a date in the shop's own ledger.
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Book 5
The Spring Wedding Murder
Three weeks to make a wedding garden out of a bare block, and only on the ground does Hazel learn whose family hired her. Then the firm's bookkeeper dies on the night of the betrothal.
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Book 6
The Summer Memorial Murder
A filled bed settles half an inch a week, and one length of the new memorial garden has given back far too much, twice. Two spits down, the spade stops, because what is in that bed cannot be.
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Book 7
The Autumn Foxglove Murder
Hazel is paid to clear a dead man's garden before auction: five weeks, no questions asked. Then she reads the foxgloves, nine of them stripped to the crown, the cut scars not all of one age.
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Book 8
The Winter Camellia Murder
By Saturday the police have a returned soldier in Long Bay for the Maybury robbery. The plants Hazel has watered every Thursday for two years say the house was emptied days before that night. The final Hazel Drummond mystery.
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