Dimensions
153 x 31 x 233mm
A garden is the perfect place to bury family secrets.
When Victoria and Guy Blakeney-Jones inherit the tiny Cornish island of Trelise, it looks as if they have lucked into an idyll. The island is beautiful, the population friendly. And the sub-tropical Priory gardens await restoration to their former splendour.
But there is more than a hint of the bizarre in the Priory gardens, laid out in 1845 on the site of an ancient monastery by Guy's ancestor, the herbalist Joshua Jones, and as restoration proceeds, Victoria realises there are more than rare plants and philosophical notions hidden among the walks and terraces. Like a skeleton with a fractured skull, unearthed in the Sea Garden, once the monastery's burial ground. In a graveyard you get skeletons, says Guy. Victoria, however, is not to be fobbed off, and with the help of Trelise's library, and boxes of letters and diaries unopened since the death of their writers, she begins a search for the skeleton's identity.
As she digs deeper into the tormented history of five generations of Joneses at Trelise, she sheds light on buried secrets: secrets that germinate into a nightmare that threatens to heave apart the present. And as she tangles with the people of Trelise past and present, she learns a dreadful truth: in gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death...
