Summer Garden Murder
Ann Ripley
Kensington August 2005, $22.00, 304 pp.
ISBN 0755208178

TV show host and gardener Louse Eldridge is shocked when she sees Peter Hoffman, a murderer who she apprehended five years ago. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent four years in a mental hospital in the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia. He has the audacity to show his face at his old stomping grounds and makes it seem like he and Louise are going to have a meeting to iron out their differences.

Before that can happen, his wife Phyllis overhears a conversation where he sells his arms factory before he leaves the country. His wife is left with the house and a stipend. Soon after that meeting Peter disappears and an anonymous tip leads the police to Louise's garden where they find his body. When another corpse is found on her property, it looks like Louise might go to jail unless she finds the killer.

Readers who love good, complex and refreshing amateur stealth tales without any blood or gore will want to read SUMMER GARDEN MURDER. The protagonists is a plucky and independent sort not content to let others find the murderer but is determined to ferret out the person herself because it is her life that is on the line. Ann Ripley has written another exciting garden mystery that is so absorbing readers will read it in one sitting.

Harriet Klausner