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Summary
Summary
Set in the Tuscan hills, this new work by the bestselling author of Amagansett is the story of two murders, 400 years apart--and the ties that bind them.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two murders separated by centuries make up the heart of this excellent literary mystery. Set in the beautiful Tuscan countryside during the summer of 1958, Mills's novel tells the story of Adam Strickland, an art history major researching the 16th-century garden on the grounds of the Villa Docci. As Strickland studies the intricate sculptures and inscriptions in the garden, he deciphers a series of clues that hint at a murder committed more than 400 years ago. He also discovers evidence of another murder, this one only 14 years in the past. Unraveling the former mystery will find him a place in academic history, but solving the latter will place his life in danger. Stuart brings just the right touch to his reading of this intelligently written story. With an excellent use of his vocal talents, he moves easily from one character to another, never overplaying the accents or gender. His descriptive narration uses Mills's prose to sweep the listener into a classic world of intrigue and suspense. Fans of P.D. James and the like will enjoy. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In the second novel from Mills (Amagansett, 2004), a student unearths deadly secrets at a stately Tuscan villa. Cambridge scholar Adam Banting gets an unexpected offer from his mentor, Prof. Crispin Leonard: to explore the exotic garden of Leonard's old friend Signora Docci, and write an academic study of her singular garden. Having few other prospects and languishing in his relationship with aspiring writer Gloria, Adam accepts. Over ten years after WWII ended, the collective Italian psyche has conflicting emotions about its role in the war. Indeed, Signora Docci dotes on the memory of her son Emilio, whose death at the hands of German soldiers is shrouded in mystery. Adam gets contradictory snippets from a friendly local tradesman named Fausto and from the Signora's flirtatious granddaughter, Antonella, among others, before his charming, no-account brother Harry arrives unexpectedly to complicate his life. The garden Adam's come to study is lush and elaborate, its statuary eerily sensual and life-like. His appreciation warms the glamorous Signora Docci, and she unexpectedly takes him to bed, making him promise to keep their tryst a secret. He's excited to discover that the nine tiers of the garden correspond to the Dante's nine circles of Hell. As he uncovers more secrets about Emilio's suspicious death, Adam realizes that subtle features of the garden are offering clues. A murder puzzle wrapped around a literary deconstruction grounded in a perceptive study of seduction and survival. Sublime. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Mills' second novel carves out new territory for the British author, whose superb debut, Amagansett (2004), told the story of a Basque fisherman on Long Island. This one, though still set in the post-World War II era, takes place in Tuscany, where Adam Banting, a Cambridge architecture student, is doing research on a famous Renaissance garden. But as he digs into the history and iconography of the garden, he comes to believe that the seemingly tranquil bower offers a road map to how its original owner murdered his wife. Similarly, as Adam learns more about the family who now owns the garden, he follows the trail of a more contemporary murder. This sort of jumping between historical and contemporary crimes has become commonplace, even cliched, in highbrow literary thrillers, but Mills uses the technique effectively, generating tension on both fronts and introducing some dizzying plot machinations. Adam is a bit too callow to hold our attention the way the robust Basque did in Amagansett, but there is plenty here to captivate those who like high culture mixed with high crime (fans of Iain Pears, for example). --Bill Ott Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HISTORICAL mysteries often convey a sense of yearning for people and places irretrievably lost in time. That feeling surfaced in Mark Mills's haunting first novel, "Amagansett," as a lyrical lament for a Long Island fishing community whose traditional way of life was doomed by the booming prosperity of postwar America. Although a keen sense of loss and longing also suffuses Mills's second novel, THE SAVAGE GARDEN (Putnam, $24.95), the youth of its protagonist and the thrill of his exploits as an amateur sleuth keep depression at bay in this romantic and gracefully executed literary puzzle. Adam Strickland is drifting toward a degree in art history at Cambridge University in 1958 when his mentor comes up with a fascinating thesis topic and the funds to pursue it. Adam is to spend two weeks as the guest of the aged Francesca Docci at her villa in the Tuscan hills, studying a Renaissance garden built by a Florentine banker in memory of his wife, who died in 1548 at the age of 25. With precise references to well-known Renaissance paintings and famous gardens like Bomarzo and the Boboli, Mills creates an enchanting vision of wooded glades and grottoes, temples and reflecting pools, amphitheaters and classical statues of "petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage." But Adam is struck by certain discordant elements in the iconography of the garden - including a rather provocative marble statue of the banker's wife - and it's only by consulting sources like Ovid and Dante that he's able to unlock the garden's sad and ultimately shocking secrets. Mark Mills Although the aesthetic clues unearthed by Adam's classical scholarship are the most elegant aspect of the novel's design, the allegory of the Renaissance garden isn't the only mystery to be solved. As he did in "Amagansett," Mills uses a suspicious death as a way of examining the scars of war that never heal in a tight-knit community. Here on the estate, it's the murder of the elder Docci son and heir, ostensibly shot in the last days of the war by German soldiers occupying the villa, but a source of deep curiosity to Adam because he hears conflicting accounts of it from everyone in the household. Struggling to keep his head in this seductively drawn company of educated and refined landowners, Adam applies his academic approach to the tantalizing mystery and, at no small cost to his own ego, eventually solves it. But in the process this naïve young man also learns more than any outsider needs to know about the desperate measures families will adopt to survive the wounds of war. Playing the hero in a crime novel is a tough job at the best of times, but that professional burden falls especially hard on lawmen in western mysteries who have taken up environmental causes. In FREE FIRE (Putnam, $24.95), Joe Pickett, the Wyoming game warden who normally gives chase to cattle rustlers, out-of-season hunters and bug-eyed wilderness survivalists in the rugged outdoor novels of C. J. Box, is entrusted with nothing less than the well-being of Yellowstone National Park. Not even the governor grasps the magnitude of the threat to its natural resources when he dispatches Joe to investigate the bizarre case of a man who got away with killing four people because the murders were committed on a patch of ground beyond the legal jurisdiction of three states and, given a loophole in the law, federal prosecutors as well. "When I think of crime committed out-of-doors, I think of Joe Pickett," the governor says. So do we. And Joe doesn't let us down, leading us on an exhilarating tour of the park that covers every natural wonder, from showy Old Faithful to secret thermal springs spewing microbes, found nowhere else on earth, that may have great scientific and commercial value. But Box reaches too far with a convoluted plot about the environmental threat of "bio-mining" for these rare microbes, a subject that taxes his expository skills and undercuts Joe's greater value as a guide to nature in the raw. Hugh Davoren, the narrator of Neil McMahon's noir western thriller, LONE CREEK (HarperCollins, $24.95), admits that "wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish and above all futile." But that doesn't stop this cowboy existentialist from playing judge, jury and executioner when he discovers two shotgunned and gutted horses buried in the dump at the Montana ranch where he works as a construction hand. Davoren's rationale for dispensing violent justice to those who are destroying the old West would be more persuasive if he were less self-absorbed - and not such a sucker for the wiles of dangerous women. Nonetheless, McMahon is a writer and a half, and whenever he peels away from his brooding hero to look at the landscape or listen to the thoughts of humbler men, his words carry for miles. Maverick cops who write their own rules out of frustration with the criminal justice system are hardly unknown in detective fiction, but it's rare to find one whose decline and fall is as tragic as that of Detective Inspector Harry Synnott, the Dublin police officer who loses his soul in Gene Kerrigan's gripping procedural, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR (Europa, paper, $14.95). Synnott is well aware that his old-fashioned values are out of sync with those of the new, entrepreneurial Ireland. But while the Celtic Tiger may have joined the modern world, Synnott can see that "we're still committing the same old crimes," and it eats him up when a rape case is compromised by his hard-nosed ethical code. To Synnott's grief, his efforts to game the system on another case go seriously awry, endangering the life of a young informant. "You're not the first policeman to find himself tripping over an ambiguous moral line," a superior officer observes. While that's hardly any comfort for Harry Synnott, it's good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero. In Mark Milk's second historical mystery, a young British scholar unearths the sad, shocking secrets of a Renaissance garden.
Library Journal Review
Scholar Adam Banting discovers the ties that bind two murders, committed 400 years apart in the Tuscan hills. The second novel (following Amagansett) by Crime Writers Association Award winner Mills, who lives in Oxford. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.