Out this month: Anthony Eglin's GARDEN OF SECRETS PAST

Anthony Eglin, whose books I've covered previously here, was kind enough to contact me and let me know he's got another book coming out, and to thank me for the coverage I've given him. I was most flattered and delighted to receive not only his thanks but some press materials for the new book. I was hard on his third book, but I did like the idea and I thoroughly enjoyed the first two and like his characters and overall oeuvre, so I feel no qualm about doing a little plugeroo here.

In the garden of a country estate, an ancient monument holds a cryptic secret. For two centuries its chiseled inscription has baffled the world’s cleverest minds. 

When the dead body of a man is found nearby, another mystery is revealed: in his pocket is a scrap of paper bearing a sequence of letters, thought to be a code. With the police investigation stalled, retired Professor, Lawrence Kingston, is hired to conduct an independent inquiry. 

Before long he is chin-deep in the treacherous undertow of a centuries-old family feud, entangled in another murder by poisoning and veiled threats on his own life. 

To solve the secrets of the past and the crimes of the present, he must delve into the minds of three eminent 18th-century Englishmen, to fathom what role each played in the age-old mystery, then decipher a complex code found hidden in the walls of an old manor house. 

In Eglin’s fifth novel, the line between historical fact and fiction is blurred ingeniously as we follow the erudite Kingston into an England of the past and its dangerous present.

This all sounds like roaring good fun, so I'm going to have to hunt it down. As you can tell from the photos I take, I do have a fondness for grand gardens, and this sounds like it has all the right gothick touches that I liked so much in the first two books.

Plus, let's be honest:  Eglin has proven himself to be quite the good fellow. Since he's cool enough to reach out to me like this, he deserves our business. I'll be hunting down a copy and we'll see how it goes...and never fear, dear readers, I will be honest.

A Quick Look at Anthony Eglin

After a wild week getting my first bifocals and being looked over by an ophthalmologist (yup, glaucoma all right, and I'm on two different eye drops, one in the morning and one at night), and hurricane Hannah passing through yesterday (albeit rather unimpressively), I'm finally relaxing on Sunday night with a glass of a sprightly Gascon white by the laptop, Bartok on the stereo, and windows open to the buzz of crickets outside.

I don't garden. It's hard, having a small urban apartment, to garden, and even if I had a house, would I? I don't know. I slaved away quite a bit in my parents' garden, taking care of vegetables I didn't eat (I still abhor okra and bell peppers) or flowers I didn't care about (for a while, my mother had a passion for gloriosa daisies, a flower I found quite unattractive and still do). I do enjoy strolling through other gardens locally, like lovely National Arboretum, or Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, or nearby Brookside Gardens. A few years ago a friend and I had a great time visiting Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and I keep meaning to go back at some point. I'm enchanted with the the idea of a garden, but I'm not sure I want all the work that goes with it. And currently there's no way in hell I could afford a gardener, even if I had the space.