The Garden Club's Youngest Member
A Cozy Mystery

About this book:

Riley Quinn traded a Chicago marketing career for her grandmother's overgrown Victorian cottage and a yard that violates every municipal code in Shady Creek. Desperate to avoid daily fines, she joins the local garden club—only to find herself adopted by a quartet of sharp-tongued, secateur-wielding septuagenarians who treat horticulture like tactical warfare. Between Evelyn's blueberry scones, George's bypass loppers, Beatrice's rhubarb wine, and Eleanor's iron-fisted leadership, Riley's jungle of a backyard becomes a show garden in the making. But the town's feuds run deeper than the heritage oaks Arthur Pendelton wants to bulldoze, and the club's newest member has just inherited a generations-old war.

When the Shady Creek Garden Tour's premier benefactor turns up dead in his own greenhouse—bludgeoned with a garden spade—the club's pruning shears become alibis and every member a suspect. Sheriff Bradley knows exactly where to start asking questions: the women who threatened Arthur at their meeting, the treasurer who wanted to take a shovel to him, the president who knows every buried secret in town. Riley came home to dig in the dirt; now she's digging for a killer while trying to keep her grandmother's legacy—and her new friends—from being uprooted.

Witty, warm, and rooted in small-town charm, *The Garden Club's Youngest Member* cultivates a mystery where the clues grow in the compost, the suspects serve the best scones in the county, and the deadliest weeds are the ones with motives.