Pushing Up Daisies

by Rosemary Harris

Overview

Meet Paula Holliday, a transplanted media exec who trades her stilettos for garden clogs when she makes the move from the big city to the suburbs to start a gardening business. Paula can handle deer, slugs, and the occasional human pest-but she's not prepared for the mummified body she finds while restoring the gardens at Halcyon, a local landmark. Casual snooping turns serious when a body is impaled on a garden tool and one of Paula's friends is arrested for the crime. Aided by the still-hot aging rocker who owns the neighborhood greasy spoon, a wise-cracking former colleague, and a sexy Mexican laborer with a few secrets of his own, Paula digs for the truth and unearths more dirty business the town has kept buried for years...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781500903817
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Series:	Dirty Business Mysteries , #1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rosemary Harris was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has been a bookstore manager, a video producer, and a television executive. She and her husband split their time between New York City and Fairfield County, Connecticut, where she is a master gardener. Visit her Web site at www.rosemaryharris.com.

Editorial Reviews

in Harris's cozy debut, budding landscaper Paula Holliday turns sleuth after the former documentary filmmaker, a New York City transplant to the suburbs, unearths a box containing "a small dead body" in the neglected, overgrown garden of the Springfield, Conn., house of the recently deceased Peacock sisters, Dorothy and Renata. Sgt. Michael O'Malley, who "looked like he knew his way to the donut shop," leads the crime investigation, but Paula does her share of detecting, supported by such friends as Lucy Cavanaugh, a fellow filmmaker, and Wanda "Babe" Chinnery, the proprietor of the local diner where all and sundry come to gossip. Harris does a good job developing her characters, their friendships and romances, though the mystery itself borders on the formulaic. Still, the action builds to a satisfying denouement and gardeners will appreciate the author's insider knowledge. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

Hired by the local historical society to restore the gardens of Halcyon, a Connecticut estate, Paula Holliday, who left New York City to open a landscaping business in the suburbs, discovers the mummified body of a baby. Harris, a master gardener, makes a charming debut with this botanical mystery, but as sometimes happens with new authors, she devotes too many pages to the garden restoration and not enough to fleshing out the mystery. For cozy fans who like their amateur sleuths working in a particular profession. Harris lives in New York City and Fairfield County, CT. [A Minotaur First Edition Selection; library marketing campaign; see Prepub Mystery, LJ10/1/07.]

—Jo Ann Vicarel

Library Journal