Flowerbed of State
A White House Gardener Mystery #1
Dorothy St. James

Berkley
May 2011/ ISBN 978-0-425-24057-1
Mystery/Cozy
Amazon

Reviewed by Laura Hinds

“Flowerbed of State” is the first in a new series featuring White House Gardener, Casey Calhoun, who has been hired by the First Lady to work on making the gardening on site more organic and natural. Casey has a green-thumb and an eye for putting just the right elements into a garden to make it stand out.

Unfortunately for Casey, she is the victim of an attack while working in one of the gardens. She wakes up to find a Secret Service Agent and must try to fill in the blanks about what happened to her. She was assaulted from behind and has no idea why anyone would target her. It gets worse though when Casey notices some damage to a tree and checks it out and finds a very dead body.

The plot thickens as it is learned that the murdered woman is a Treasury employee who was involved in audits of accounts of some important people. How deeply the President might be involved –or not at all- is bothersome to Casey. She finds herself in more scrapes and the Agent she met after her attack does his job to save her.

Naturally, with this being a cozy mystery the protagonist instantly becomes an amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the murder and finds herself embroiled in the seeds of danger planted by a murderer. Will Casey even be able to keep her new job after this tragic event? Will she even want to?

Organic gardening tips are liberally sprinkled throughout the book, making it interesting to gardeners everywhere, as well as to mystery lovers. The characters are easy to like and the plot is well thought out and presented. Overall I’d say this is a really good start to a new mystery series that will be well received by fans of the genre.

The book is unique, a fast read and excellent for that lazy day on your hammock in the backyard; it will encourage you to look around at your own property and consider implementing some organic gardening techniques while keeping your eyes peeled for signs of mischief. If you don’t have a yard of your own, take it to a park to read. After all, the setting for this book is Presidential Park, where the White House is located, and your local park will likely have some interesting trees, shrubs and flowers too, but hopefully without any corpses!