Jean Loftus has lived at Asshe House for more than 40 years. Its tidy contours, the soft colors of the garden, speak to an orderly, gracious life, a supremely English life. But when workmen unearth a skeleton from that garden, the skeletons from Jean's past begin rising, similarly, to the surface. And the life they speak to - a childhood in Revolutionary Russia, chaotic years as a refugee between the two world wars - was neither orderly nor English. Zita Daunsey, Jean's neighbor in this cozy Sussex town, would like to help Jean protect her secrets. But this task is made more difficult with the sudden arrival of a mysterious, aggressively inquisitive Russian student.

Whose body has been moldering in the garden? What aging sins is Jean so anxious to conceal? And in trying to help the past stay buried, at what point does Zita become an accomplice to it?...

Gold Dagger nominee In 1925 beautiful, bohemian Diana Pollexfen was celebrating her 30th birthday. The celebrations soured when her husband died, poisoned by a cocktail that had been liberally laced with some of Diana’s photographic chemicals. Sixty years later, Diana’s grand-niece, Helena, is also turning 30, but with rather less fanfare. An overworked attorney in London, Helena’s primary social outlet is an obsessive love affair. By way of distraction, Helena starts looking through her great-aunt’s papers and soon develops another obsession: Determining just who did kill George Pollexfen in that lovely, sunlit garden between the wars. “Elizabeth Ironside” is the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, wife of the British Ambassador to the U.S. Her first novel won Britain’s John Creasey Award for Best First Mystery of 1985, and Death in the Garden was nominated for Britain’s CWA Gold Dagger for Best Mystery of 1995....

Felony & Mayhem's British category mystery...