The second Enchanted Garden Mystery from Bailey Cattrell—author of the New York Times bestselling Magical Bakery Mysteries as Bailey Cates.
Elliana Allbright’s custom-made perfume shop and the Enchanted Garden behind it are garnering all sorts of attention, but a dead body could bury her in bad publicity. . . .
Ellie’s business and personal life have been flourishing in her hometown of Poppyville, California, since she opened Scents & Nonsense. She uses her very special skills to craft perfumes that almost magically ease heartache, inspire change, and bring joy—and her customers love to relax in the beautiful garden behind her shop with her corgi, Dash, and her cat, Nabokov. She even lives right next to the garden, in a compact “tiny house”—and she’s excited to hear that a journalist is going to write a feature about her home and garden for a national magazine.
But then the journalist is found dead, and suspicion falls on the last person to see him—who just happens to be Ellie’s brother’s girlfriend. So before everything goes to seed, Ellie must rely on her powers—observational and otherwise—to pick out the real killer from an ever-expanding bouquet of culprits. . . .
I had been looking forward to this book, because I was pretty impressed with the first one. Although I'm a fan of Cattrell's other work, I really fell for this series' backdrop of a woman who creates a beautiful garden and uses what she grows to distill her own essential oils, mixing custom perfumes in her small shop. I'm not overly interested in the perfume angle, but the gardening and the tiny house she lives in all sound, not to put too fine a point on it, enchanting.
This sophomore entry doesn't disappoint as far as the garden and the distilling goes, and the slight hint at paranormal gifts that was in the first one is expanded upon here, but there's a love triangle in the making, which is always disappointing. Luckily, the murder mystery was pretty good; the resolution managed to take me almost completely by surprise.
I'll definitely read a third one, if it's in the offing, and there's a recipe for lavender shortbread in the back of this one I'm itching to try.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
21 June, 2017:
Finished reading
-
21 June, 2017:
Reviewed