June Rowan flew to Oaxaca to write about a convent garden coming back to life—not to find its patron dead among the apothecary beds.
A year after Myrtle Cove, June has a byline, a life she chose, and the assignment she'd have begged for twelve months ago: six weeks in Oaxaca, Mexico, chronicling the restoration of a colonial convent garden for Provenance. There's one problem, and she learns it before she's even packed. Edmund is the photographer.
Then Rosario Valdovinos—the woman funding the restoration—is found collapsed among the old apothecary beds, a week out from Día de los Muertos. What was meant to be a warm feature about marigolds and bells stops being that. The town has a story about this garden. Two hundred years ago, they say, the convent's herbalist poisoned a sister, took a fortune, and vanished. It's a legend that explains a death very conveniently—and June, who used to be the kind of journalist who noticed things like that, can't leave it alone. The official record says one thing. The ground says another. Nobody ever thought to ask the people who kept the real version alive.
Detective Camila Ortiz Flores has the murder. June has the two hundred years underneath it. Neither of them closes this alone—and someone in the Valdovinos family has spent a lifetime assuming the past belongs to them.
Because Rosario wasn't killed for what she'd found. She was killed for what she was about to say out loud.
Marigolds on every corner. A silver bell nobody has rung in two centuries. A woman written out of the record on purpose, in a town that spends one night a year refusing to forget anyone.
How do you tend a garden grown from a grief nobody will say out loud?
- A garden two centuries in the wrong
- A legend that blames the wrong woman
- The photographer she'd rather not be stuck with
- A killer inside the family
- A festival that refuses to forget anyone
- Closed door romance, no gore, No cliffhanger
A Murder at the Marigold Cloister is the first full-length novel in the June Rowan Restoration Mysteries: cozy, closed-door garden mysteries set in beautiful places around the world, for readers who'd rather be somewhere else—preferably somewhere with a secret buried beneath it. A Mexican cozy mystery, a slow-burn romance, and a puzzle that plays fair.
The series begins with the optional prequel, A Murder on the Jacaranda Coast.
