Review: The Bluebonnet Betrayal by Marty Wingate

The Bluebonnet Betraya (Potting Shed Mystery, #5) by Marty Wingate
Formats available: ebook
Series: Potting Shed #5
Pages: 294
Published by Alibi on August 2nd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
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Bestselling author Marty Wingate “plants clever clues with a dash of romantic spice,” raves Mary Daheim. Now Wingate’s inimitable gardening heroine, Pru Parke, is importing a precious bloom from Texas—and she won’t let a vicious murder stop her.   Pru’s life in England is coming full circle. A Texas transplant, she’s married to the love of her life, thriving in the plum gardening position she shares with her long-lost brother, and prepping a Chelsea Flower Show exhibit featuring the beloved bluebonnets of the Texas hill country. Technically, Twyla Woodford, the president of a gardening club in the Lone Star State, is in charge of the London event, but Pru seems to be the one getting her hands dirty. When they finally do meet, Pru senses a kindred spirit—until Twyla turns up dead.   Although Twyla’s body was half buried under a wall in their display, Pru remains determined to mount a spectacular show. Twyla would have insisted. So Pru recruits her husband, former Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Pearse, to go undercover and do a bit of unofficial digging into Twyla’s final hours. If Pru has anything to say about it, this killer is going to learn the hard way not to mess with Texas.

My Review:

Another garden, another dead body. In real life, I think that people would be just a bit afraid to hire Pru Parke. She’s an excellent gardener with a top-notch reputation in her field, but wherever she plants her spade, a corpse pops up.

In this fifth outing in the Potting Shed series, Pru is planting her spade in the illustrious and internationally renowned Chelsea Flower Show. It’s the kind of opportunity that no gardener could possibly refuse, even if it’s only for a few days until the real crew arrives in London. A crew coming from Pru’s former home state of Texas.

That’s Pru’s connection to the group. Someone in the Austin Rocks Garden Society (ARGS!) remembers Pru from her days in Texas, and asks her to keep an eye on their Chelsea entry until their über-organized garden club president arrives on the scene. Only to promptly get murdered in the middle of the barely-started display.

Pru finds herself and puts herself in the thick of things yet again. With their fearless leader out of the picture, the somewhat shattered ARGS members turn to Pru to keep their disaster-prone entry on track. And Pru, as usual, can’t resist attempting to solve the murder. In spite of a whole lot of stonewalling by the police Inspector who takes the case. He’s one of Pru’s husband Christopher’s former sergeants, and the position he has is Christopher’s former job. He feels the need to prove himself at any cost, including ignoring the sage advice of both his former boss and that boss’s intrepid new spouse.

So Pru sticks her nose into the investigation in spite of being warned off at every turn. And Christopher goes undercover among the garden assistants, partly to help Pru investigate, but mostly to keep that investigation from putting Pru into deadly danger, as her investigations usually do.

But Pru rushes in where angels and sensible people would rightly fear to tread. As usual. And the killer very nearly catches her.

Escape Rating B+: This series is always a real treat for both cozy mystery fans and gardening mystery fans. For anyone who is a fan of Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles series, the frequent references to Pru’s gardening past in Texas should make those readers feel right at home.

And for those who are new to this series, unlike most cozies this is not a series where the cast of players continues from one book to the next. Except for Christopher, almost everyone in this book is new to Pru Parke and her world. Pru is always going from one garden to another, and has new assistants and new plants to work with in every book, as well as new murders to solve.

Part of the fun in this particular entry is the peek behind the scenes at the famous Chelsea Flower Show. I saw a bit of it once on a trip to London, and it is a sight not to be missed if one is there at the right time. It is the ultimate flower festival, and even for someone with a black thumb (like me) the displays are beyond beautiful.

One of the other things that makes this particular mystery interesting is the scientific aspect both to the display that is being created and to the crime. There are some thought-provoking points made about the use and purposes of scientific advancement in agriculture and ecology. The questions about whether the ends justify the particular means linger after the mystery is solved.

The Potting Shed is a terrific series and I sincerely hope there will be more to come. In the meantime, the author’s other cozy series, Birds of a Feather, will be continuing with Every Trick in the Rook in January.

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