Our Garden Bloggers’ Book Club virtual meeting takes place outside today in the light shade of the honey locust tree.
As you enter the back yard, something feels ‘not quite right’. Something is amiss. There is an air of mystery in the garden.
You look beyond the chairs set up for the virtual book club meeting and off in the vegetable garden, you see a row of late green beans, eaten down to nubs. Gasp! Nearby off to one side, with just his unlucky foot visible, there appears to be a dead rabbit under the snowball viburnum. Just then, the neighbor’s cat saunters through the garden with a look of quiet satisfaction as though he is the king of the garden and has once again proven it.
When I greet you to bring you around to the back yard, I seem to be in a bit of a hurry and am still carrying a sharp spade, as though I was planning to dig a hole.
Or was my spade used for a more sinister purpose?
The pre-meeting whispers begin…
“Did you see the corpse of the rabbit?”
“Did the rabbit eat the beans and then Carol finally snapped and killed the rabbit?”
“What is with that cat, licking his paws and doing all he can to ignore the rabbit? He did it!”
“Does it look like the rabbit was hit with a shovel or attacked by a cat?”
“What happened to those bean plants?
”Whodunnit?”
Whodunit is the focus of our virtual book club meeting today as we read and discuss garden mysteries. We have several reviews to go through, so ignoring what might have happened here at May Dreams Gardens prior to your arrival, I present those reviews in the order posted.
Bev at Bev’s Colorado Garden, Trouble in Spades by Heather Webber
Crafty Gardener at In My Canadian Garden, Digging up Trouble by Heather Webber
Old Roses at A Gardening Year, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
LostRoses at Lost-Roses, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
Gotta Garden at Gotta Garden, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
Nan at Letters from a Hill Farm, A Brush With Death by Sheila Pim
Carol at May Dreams Gardens, Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters
KJohnson at Musings of a Garden Historian, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
Bill at Prairie Point, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
Annie at The Transplantable Rose, Thyme of Death by Susan Wittig Albert
Nan Ondra left a comment about another Sheila Pim book, Common or Garden Crime
Sara from Farming Friends, A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber
Entangled at Tangled Branches: Cultivated, several different mysteries
Gloria at Pollinators-Welcome, The Savage Garden by Mark Mills
Thank you all for posting for the Garden Bloggers’ Book Club! We had several regular participants, some people who have participated before but not every time, and some brand new members. All are always welcome!
If you are still planning to post a review of a garden mystery, let me know when you’ve done so and I’ll add you to our list of reviews in this post.
And now as the meeting breaks up and I start to clean up and put away the chairs, I can hear in the background a few of you as you stand around and ask each other more questions about today’s mystery at May Dreams Gardens.
“What do those pruners have to do anything?”
“Is that cape code weeder sharp enough to use to kill a rabbit?”
“Is Carol fast enough to catch a rabbit?”
“Oh my, did you see that hoe? How does that hoe fit in as a clue? There’s always a hoe around these gardens!”
“Shouldn’t we alert someone about what is going on here?”
I pretend not to hear.
For our next meeting at the end of November, we’ll go back to the classics and read Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perényi. I look forward to having everyone from this month back, plus as many others as would like to join us.
Oh, and one more thing. No rabbits were killed or even frightened in the staging of this murder mystery at May Dreams Gardens. All clues were random, the mystery is completely fictitious and I have no idea how to solve it or finish it up for a nice, neat, tidy, complete blog post about garden mysteries. So it shall remain a mystery.
Happy Gardening and Happy Reading until next time!
Oh, you so had me going there…I thought for sure that the neighbor’s cat had finally killed the rabbit.
You need a dog to do the deed. Our dauchsund was quite proud of herself yesterday — I’ll let her tell you the next time you’re over…
Loved the post….
Hi Carol– this is an invitation to join the Garden Bloggers Retro carnival. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the concept of a Blog carnival – if not I’ve explained it in detail on my site today (Oct 1). But basically the idea is to revive an old post which you think is worth rereading, or which you think new readers might enjoy. Send me the link to the post, and in November I’ll publish a series of posts describing and linking to all the posts people have nominated.
I hope you’ll join in and we have a fun carnival!
Sue
PS – Love the Leaf cams!
Hi Carol,
You really had us going with the garden mystery at May Dreams Gardens.
It’s October 1 and you promised last month to post a poem for Muse Day.
Carol, I think I liked your mystery better than Heather Webber’s. 😉
I’m late to the party, as usual, but I tried to make up for it by writing about more than one book. I’m off now to read the other reviews…
Carol, since I never got around to picking up “A Hoe Lot Of Trouble” I went with an audio garden mystery that I listened to this month. “The Savage Garden” by Mark Mills.
It is up now at http://pollinators-welcome.blogspot.com/
Looks like I’ll be up late this evening trying to catch up…
Hi, glad to see gardeners are also interested in mystery novels! I wrote about Ann Ripley and Anthony Eglin in my blog, http://www.bookbirddog.blogspot.com
They both write gardening mystery novels.