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Title details for Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King - Available

Back to the Garden

by Laurie R. King
Vivienne Leheny
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved sites on the West Coast. Its owners thought their secrets were buried forever—but when cold-case investigator Raquel Laing arrives, secrets are all she sees.
A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: The Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.
And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new era, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.
Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate's young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents—monsters like
The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.
Could the skull belong to one of his victims?
To Raquel—a woman who knows all about colorful pasts—the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all its own.
Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend had vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.
But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate the summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob's brother, Fort.
The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case—before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 6, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705044612
      • File size: 321173 KB
      • Duration: 11:09:06

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Vivienne Leheny's steady delivery and warm tone welcome listeners into Laurie R. King's latest novel, a contemporary mystery set in California. While different from King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, it features an equally intriguing female detective in Raquel Laing, a police department cold case investigator. While working to identify victims of a 1970s serial killer, Laing investigates a corpse found on the grounds of the Gardener Estate Museum. Leheny skillfully performs a host of characters--those featured in Laing's investigations and those who were part of the estate's 1970s-era commune--by creating audio sketches of walk-on folks and personality-rich voices for the core people. Leheny's even pacing keeps listeners on track amid multiple plot lines, and when the action explodes, she delivers a satisfying burst of frenzy. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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