Mulch
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Rooting out a killer can dig you a grave...
Amateur gardener and housewife Louise Eldridge has big plans for her family's new Sylvan Valley home, situated among the flower of suburban Washington, D.C., society. Some Japanese iris here, some skunk cabbage there...and her own cozy cabin for her horticultural writings. But barely has she turned the topsoil when her organic mulching unearths the unidentifiable remains of a murder victim. Suddenly her elegant garden is a crime scene blighted by garish yellow police tape.
And Louise--cultivating the rich and restless wives of the neighborhood and their hothouse secrets--must find out who has gone missing. For only then can she root out a rare species of killer who could soon be digging her grave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coincidence and intuition figure prominently in the two-pronged plot of this slender, predictable first novel set in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Foreign-service wife Louise Eldridge is settling her family into their new northern Virginia home, in the same neighborhood where Peter Hoffman, a possible candidate for undersecretary of defense, lives. Louise, an organic gardener, begins to collect bags of leaves from her neighbors' curbsides to fill in a low spot in the back yard. Concurrently, Peter realizes he must jettison his mistress, another neighbor, in order to stay in the running for the government post. Louise and her family are shocked to discover parts of a severed body in some of the lawn bags. When Louise's husband agrees to vet Peter, the Eldridges throw a dinner party, at which a slightly tipsy Louise leads the smarmy Peter to suspect she connects him to the murder. Their subsequent meeting, when Louise bravely fends off Peter's attempt to kill her, will not surprise those readers who have stuck with the story.
