The Bruised Bud by Jody Chaffin

The Bruised Bud by Jody Chaffin
A Larkspur Hollow Garden Club Mystery, Book 6
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Cozy Mystery, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Two hundred and fifty years of history. Twenty minutes nobody can account for.
Larkspur Hollow has been waiting a long time for this spring. The village turns two hundred and fifty years old, and the Garden Club has poured everything it has into an anniversary Flower Show worth the number.

Then Margot Hartwell — the last of the Hartwells, the woman whose money was quietly remaking the valley — walks out to hundreds of people on the green, says something no two witnesses will ever agree on, and dies on the grass in front of all of them.

Six people had a reason. Only one had the twenty minutes.

Retired schoolteacher, master gardener, and reluctant detective Nell Ashworth has worked five of these now. She has never had one where the whole village was watching and nobody saw a thing.

Feelings aren’t facts, right?

Some of my favorite passages were the ones that showed how Larkpur Hollow had grown as a community since it was first introduced in The Buried Bloom. This included everything from buildings that had recently been upgraded to new people who had moved into this area and so much more. While all of the books in this series do work perfectly well as standalone stories, I’d recommend reading them in publication order because of how much I enjoyed not only getting to know the characters but also reaching this point in their lives where the events of the past coalesce together to make their permanent mark on this town. It was satisfying to nod along and reminisce a little as I compared the beginning to what I assume is the final instalment.

It would have been helpful to have more development of the mystery itself. As much as I enjoyed the subplots, the main storyline felt a little underwhelming to me due to the murderer’s motivation for their crime and what happened to them after they were discovered. This is something I’m saying as a reader who had a good time with this series in general and was hoping for a little bit more conflict before saying goodbye to the characters.

I liked what this book had to say about why some people resist change and why that resistance doesn’t always have the effect one might hope it will. Change isn’t always a good thing, of course, but it tends to happen whether or not a community feels ready for it. The philosophical trend of these portions suited the storyline well, especially as the murder investigation deepened and characters began sharing some of the most important clues about what happened.

The Bruised Bud was thoughtful.