β Scribed by Anthony Eglin
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Starred Review. In his excellent debut, Eglin combines just the right amount of horticultural detail with well-drawn characters and an absorbing plot. While Kate and Alex Sheppard explore the long neglected gardens of the Parsonage, their newly acquired, 19th-century Wiltshire country house, they discover an astonishing plantβa rose bush with blue flowers ("Not lavender or mauve, but an electric sapphire blue"). For help, the couple turn to Lawrence Kingston, a noted rose authority and incidentally a crossword puzzle aficionado, and Christopher Adell, their London legal adviser. In spite of their efforts to research the plant in secret, word of the extraordinary find gets out, and the likable Sheppards are soon mixed up with secret codes and missing journals and threatened by vicious hybridizers from Japan and the United States, as well as local growers and supposed friends. Mysterious deaths, a kidnapping, a chase and various shootings add to the suspense. Apt gardening quotations, from Edmund Spenser to Dale Carnegie, introduce each chapter.
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If you love roses, or gardening, or British mysteries, you will probably love this novel, lush with the lore and lure of all three. Eglin, a Californian and award-winning rose gardener, writes well of what he knows. Unfortunately, he is less skilled in the essentials of fiction writing: plot, dialogue, and characterization add up to not much in this first novel. Kate and Alex buy their dream cottage in Wiltshire, called the Parsonage, with its two-acre walled garden overrun with roses. What they find in a corner is the impossible: a sapphire-blue rose. Although they immediately contact a gardening expert and an attorney, they are plunged into a world of conniving relatives, rose pollination recorded in Enigma code, evil American and sneaky Japanese executives, and the mysterious death of a friend who handled the rose. It's melodramatic and the dialogue is terrible, but the rosarian detail is irresistible. GraceAnne DeCandido
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