City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Back to the Garden

eng

Adult

fiction

Back to the Garden

A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California and a colourful past filled with now-famous artists - the Gardener Estate was a 20th-century Eden. And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home's past - a human skull, hidden away for decades. Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate's young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents - monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye. Could the skull belong to one of his victims? To Raquel - a woman who knows all about colourful pasts - the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own. Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet, whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate. But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart - a young woman, her child and Rob's brother, Fort. The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case - before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes

Fiction

adult