A Thorn Among the Petals. A Harriet Ellington Botanical Mystery - Emily K. Clark

Some gardens keep secrets. Some secrets are fatal.

Ellington Hall, Shropshire, 1815. When a despised European baron collapses at Harriet Ellington's midsummer garden party, the local physician attributes his death to a failing heart. Harriet, whose knowledge of her beloved medicinal garden is as precise as any surgeon's, knows better. The symptoms tell a different story, one written in the language of alkaloids and roots, of a plant whose properties she has studied for thirty years and whose cut stems she discovers the morning after the body is removed.

Harriet is not a society woman who solves mysteries between calls and correspondence. She is a rigorous botanical mind in an era that gave women no official standing from which to use one. What she has instead is a conservatory full of specimens, a commonplace book of meticulous observations, and the habit of looking directly at the things other people prefer not to examine.

The investigation that follows will take her from the walled kitchen garden she knows plant by plant, through the drawing rooms and still-rooms of a neighbourhood that is not what it appears, and into the uncomfortable discovery that the baron's death was not an act of madness but of desperation and that almost everyone she loves had reason to want him gone.

A Thorn Among the Petals is a richly atmospheric historical mystery for readers who want their heroines sharp, their settings immersive, and their moral questions genuinely difficult. With the slow-burn tension of Susanna Clarke and the domestic precision of Miss Read, it introduces one of historical fiction's most distinctive new voices: a woman who understands that the most dangerous things are often the most beautiful, and that the truth, like a well-tended garden, rewards patient attention above all else.