TV show gardening hostess Louise Eldridge has gone from her Washington, DC home to Boulder, Colorado, for a series of shows on the delicate ecosystem of the West. Her husband and teenaged daughter accompany her, but it’s not the family time Louise had dreamed of, as her husband leaves immediately for yet another secret assignment (he’s in the CIA) and her daughter departs for counselor camp.

Louise agrees to meet the local cameraman, Pete, and Boulder land officer, Ann, for a tour at the private ranch of one Jimmy Porter, to assess the location for taping. The beautiful scenery is spoiled by the discovery of the rancher’s dead body, shot at close range and draped over the fence. Upon arrival at the scene, the local sheriff declares the killer must have been a poacher who surprised Porter, but the locals don’t believe that for a minute. Ann in particular is upset, since she had finally convinced Jimmy to turn his vast holdings over to her office for preservation as a park, and now all negotiations are off. She knows of Louise’s past successes in solving crimes and enlists her help.

Louise’s interest is piqued, when two days after Jimmy Porter’s death, his adult daughter Sally supposedly commits suicide by driving off a cliff near the ranch. Now there are just two sons left, a grasping fiancé and an elderly neighbor woman whose own property abuts the Porter ranch. Louise goes around the small town asking and observing, and she has obviously upset someone, as a few days later, someone takes a shot at her while on location at an organic farm. She misses her husband and begins to have suspicions that his unknown assignment and these deaths may not be separate incidences after all.

The entire book would have benefited from tighter editing of such ponderous phrases as “the moist riparian land burgeoned with flower species” -- Egad. There are repetitive descriptions -- “tawny eyes” were used at least four times to describe the same character trait -- and the characters’ syntax is often stilted and unnatural. As mentioned, it might have been better to have grouped the commentaries at the end of the mystery rather than interspersing them throughout, and Louise’s almost-romantic interlude with the cameraman served no useful purpose to the story. But the author offers a multitude of suspects and the murderer, once revealed, is not the usual variety.

This book will probably appeal to a sub-genre of mystery reader; the avid gardening fan, the Denverite or the ecology lover, but it might not hold the interest of the discerning mystery reader enough to make him/her want to go back and read preceding entries.

--K. W. Becker