The Borrowed Bouquet by Jody Chaffin
A Larkspur Hollow Garden Club Mystery, Book 5
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Cozy Mystery, Holiday, Contemporary
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeA bouquet nobody sent. Forty-eight puzzles to the truth.
All week, the Larkspur Hollow Garden Club has been selling Valentine’s parcels — a bouquet and a card to every house in the valley — to save a grand old Vermont house from falling down. On the night of the benefit, quiet, kind Winnie Talbot receives the most beautiful flowers anyone has ever sent her, and a card asking her to meet.
By morning she has been pulled from Larkspur Creek. The whole Hollow agrees she slipped on the ice. Retired schoolteacher Eleanor “Nell” Ashworth does not.
And nobody can say who sent those flowers. There is no order form, no payment, and no shop in the county that could have grown a rose like that in February.
But this time, the detective is you.
Each chapter hands you a scene and a word search. Solve the puzzle, and the leftover letters reveal a hidden clue — a suspect cleared, a motive exposed, a secret the Hollow would rather keep buried. Track them across forty-eight puzzles and you’ll be ready to name the killer, the motive, the weapon, and the place before Nell does.
Six suspects. One bouquet nobody can account for. A verdict only you can reach.
Valentine’s Day is a terrible time to be alone.
I’m thrilled to finally be able to give a five star rating to one of the Larkspur Hollow Garden Club mysteries. Including love in this tale was what ultimately propelled me into making this decision, although I can’t say what type of love it was without giving away spoilers. What I can say is that even thought this was about a murder it was heartwarming as well. The main characters felt more well-rounded than ever, and I deeply enjoyed getting to once again explore their complex relationships with one another.
As I originally mentioned in my review of The Buried Bloom, this series does an excellent job of exploring small town politics. It’s something that was present in that very first book but also continued to be included later on in the series in all sorts of memorable ways. This time around, it centered on the complex relationships that can develop between people who have mixed feelings about each other but are forced to interact more than is emotionally healthy for them due to the limited opportunities for socializing in such a tiny community. While I don’t want to share any spoilers about how that sort of relationship can turn out, I adored what the author did with it and am excited to see what he comes up with next.
The rose analogy worked quite well for me even though I do not grow flowers or garden in my spare time. It will be interesting to see if readers who are more familiar with gardening feel the same way, but I thought those scenes describing how roses can be grown at times of the year when plants in general do not typically bloom not only added some beauty to the storyline but also complemented the life of the victim nicely. They always felt like natural additions to the plot, and I would have happily read even more of them had this been a longer piece.
The Borrowed Bouquet immensely satisfied me.
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