About this book:

Step into the quiet charm of Maplewood, where botanist Lila Graham seeks solace and a fresh start in an old Victorian house after a profound loss. What she finds, however, is far from peaceful. The house's sprawling, neglected garden, once a place of beauty, holds a century of buried secrets. As Lila begins to restore the tangled flora, she unearths a tarnished locket, a hidden journal, and a faded map belonging to Evelyn Thorne, a young woman who vanished decades ago under mysterious circumstances.

Lila soon discovers that Evelyn’s disappearance was, in fact, an unsolved murder, tangled in a bitter feud between two of Maplewood’s most powerful families: the Thornes and the Bloomfields. With the help of a retired cold case detective and an insightful local librarian, Lila delves deeper, uncovering illicit love affairs, ruthless land grabs, and a chilling cover-up that implicates the town's most prominent figures. But as the truth begins to bloom from the hidden garden's soil, it draws the attention of a dangerous saboteur determined to keep the past buried—a saboteur who communicates in the subtle, menacing language of flowers. Lila must use her botanical expertise to decode Evelyn’s final, ingenious clues, racing against time to bring justice to a long-silenced victim and unmask a community steeped in a century of lies.