Mark Mills, The Savage Garden

The Savage Garden

Mark Mills

Putnam, May 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 0399153535

In 1958 at Cambridge University, Professor Leonard tears into wastrel student Adam Banting for spending more time with the ladies than on his thesis, for which the student has no subject. Leonard assigns him a summer project to write a paper on a sixteenth-century Tuscany garden dedicated to the then owner's late wife Signora Docci. Adam agrees that art and nature merge into a different aesthetic third type of entity.

The Professor finishes the arrangement with his long time friend, ailing septuagenarian Signora Francesca Docci. Adam leaves soon after final exams for Tuscany. He finds his hostess a combination of crusty charm, but it is the garden that hooks him with its myriad of neoclassical statues, odd grottoes and cul-de-sacs, and several ponds and brooks. The etchings fascinate him most as Adam begins to put together the writings into a cohesive message that implies Signor Docci killed his wife. Adam also starts to wonder if history repeated itself during WWII when his hostess' son was allegedly killed by the Nazis on the villa's third floor which remains just the way it was in the early 1940s. Finally he ponders over the strangest most complex mystery of all - why Signora Docci wanted a student to study her garden?

This "academic" mystery will hook the audience once Adam meets his hostess and never slows down as the hero becomes interested in more than just a beautiful garden when he begins to piece together the etchings throughout the garden that imply motive, means and opportunity of a spousal homicide. The storyline is driven by the relationship between Adam and the elderly Francesca as he feels she is a master puppeteer and he is dangling off her ropes. Fans will appreciate this deep, cerebral, amateur sleuth that contains two historical mysteries inside a cleverly devised "plot."

Harriet Klausner