Bleeding Heart
Mary Freeman
Mystery
Review posted: 7/20/03
The third book in Mary Freeman’s Rachel O’Connor gardening mystery series, Bleeding Heart
takes readers from small town Blossom to Portland, OR, when Rachel’s company, Rain
Country Landscaping is commissioned to restore the garden’s of famed botanist Eloise
Jackson. Things are going well until Eloise winds up dead one dark and stormy night.
Foul play is instantly suspected and suspects abound.
Enter Carey (Icarus) Spiros, homicide, whose obsession with the case makes Rachel every
bit as nervous as the murder. if an overzealous homicide detective wasn’t enough, Rachel
is forced to deal with a womanizing state representative, who oozes charm and something
slightly more sinister from every pore, a son who is furious to discover his mother has
left her vast estate to a nature conservancy and not to him and a mysterious personal
assistant with a past history of drug abuse.
All of Rachel’s amateur sleuthing skills are put to the task in this intriguing mystery,
but the closer she gets to the answer, the closer the murderer gets to her. To make
matters worse her mother’s acting strange, and it’s up to Rachel to figure out what the
problem is.
Bleeding Heart takes the town of Blossom and the characters from Freeman’s Gardening
Mysteries to a new level, drawing the characters in greater depth than either of the
series’ previous entries. Rachel and Jeff struggle to sort out their love life as they
unravel the tangled trail of the mystery and Rachel’s assistants, Beck, the eccentric but
basically harmless woodcarver and Julio are both shown in greater detail than ever before.
A great entry into an already strong series, Freeman is on the right track.
|
