The Savage Garden

The Savage Garden

Assigned to write a monograph about a famous sixteenth-century garden, aimless young Cambridge scholar Adam Banting visits the enigmatic garden only to discover clues that the woman to whom the garden was dedicated may have been murdered, a finding that points to a related and more recent killing. By the author of Amagansett. 75,000 first printing. Mills' second novel carves out new territory for the British author, whose superb debut, Amagansett (2004), told the story of a Basque fisherman on Long Island. This one, though still set in the post-World War II era, takes place in Tuscany, where Adam Banting, a Cambridge architecture student, is doing research on a famous Renaissance garden. But as he digs into the history and iconography of the garden, he comes to believe that the seemingly tranquil bower offers a road map to how its original owner murdered his wife. Similarly, as Adam learns more about the family who now owns the garden, he follows the trail of a more contemporary murder. This sort of jumping between historical and contemporary crimes has become commonplace, even cliched, in highbrow literary thrillers, but Mills uses the technique effectively, generating tension on both fronts and introducing some dizzying plot machinations. Adam is a bit too callow to hold our attention the way the robust Basque did in Amagansett, but there is plenty here to captivate those who like high culture mixed with high crime (fans of Iain Pears, for example). Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Mark Mills is a screenwriter whose first novel, Amagansett , was published in a dozen countries and received the British Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award. A graduate of Cambridge University, he lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.