Death in the Garden

Author: Elizabeth Ironside
Publisher: Canelo
ISBN: 178863022X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Can Helena solve the mystery of a murder in the family that has festered for over two generations? In 1925 the beautiful, bohemian Diana Pollexfen was celebrating her thirtieth birthday with a party at a country estate, but the celebrations soured when her husband died, poisoned by a cocktail that had been liberally laced with some of Diana's photographic chemicals. Sixty years later, Diana's grand-niece, Helena, is also turning thirty, but with rather less fanfare. An overworked attorney in London, Helena's primary social outlet is an obsessive love affair. By way of distraction, Helena starts looking through her great-aunt's papers and soon develops another obsession: Determining just who killed George Pollexfen in that lovely, sunlit garden between the wars. Praise for Elizabeth Ironside ‘Excellent local colour and culture, good adventure and an admirable denouement’ Marcel Berlins ‘She joins those few mystery writers you unreservedly look forward to reading ... a thoroughly satisfying psychological thriller’ Harriet Waugh, Spectator ‘A fine, stylish book to be savoured’ James Melville ‘Superbly handled ... a masterly example of classic crime fiction’ Birmingham Post ‘A spell-binding story of love, murder and deception’ Coventry Evening Telegraph ‘Enticing murder mystery’ Manchester Evening News

Death in the Garden

Author: Michael Brown
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 152670840X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
“Readers who enjoy plants and offbeat tales will find Brown’s book a happy mix” (Publishers Weekly). Mankind has always had a morbid fascination with poisonous plants. Over the centuries, poisonous plants have been used to remove garden pests—as well as unwanted rivals and deceitful partners. They have also been used for their medicinal qualities, as rather dangerous cosmetics, and even to help seduce a lover when perceived as an aphrodisiac. Some of these and other uses originate in a medieval book that has not yet been translated into English. This book delves into the history of these plants, covering such topics as: How shamans and priests used these plants for their magical attributes, as a means to foretell the future or to commune with the gods How a pot of basil helped to conceal a savage murder The truth about the mysterious mandrake A conundrum written by Jane Austen to entertain her family—the answer to which is one of the plants in this book These stories and many more will enlighten you on these treacherous and peculiar plants, their defensive and deadly traits, the facts behind them, and the folklore that has grown around them.

Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art, and Film

Author: Feryal Cubukcu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793625891
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film: Song of Death in Paradise explores the combination of two motifs, death and gardens, to show how the two subjects are intertwined and used in various media and cultural contexts. Using cultural, literary, film, and art history theories, the contributors analyze various death and garden sceneries in literary works by Arthur Machen, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, as well as in superhero comics, films, and cultural and art contexts such as Ian Hamilton Finley's “Little Sparta,” the poetic verses from the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Australian wilderness.

Death in the Garden City

Author: Jeanne M. Dams
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 1448303532
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
American Anglophile Dorothy Martin heads to the picturesque city of Victoria on Vancouver Island to investigate a series of petty crimes – that soon turn deadly. When Dorothy Martin and her ex-policeman husband Alan are asked by some good friends to look into a series of petty crimes that are perplexing the local Mounties in the picturesque Canadian city of Victoria, they immediately jump on a plane to British Columbia and settle themselves into the heart of the local community. Drinking champagne with the local businessman and would-be politician as well as cups of tea with the local recluse, they infiltrate all ranks of Victoria society. But when a young woman goes missing and a body is discovered, it would appear that the petty crimes have turned deadly. With their ability to get to the root of a crime and dig out the culprit, it’s not long before Dorothy and Alan realize they have embarked on a trip that will become far more dangerous than they ever envisaged...

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Author: John Berendt
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679429220
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city—now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author “Elegant and wicked . . . might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.”—The New York Times Book Review Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. In this sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative, John Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young people dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience.

Death Warning in the Garden of Eden

Author: Chris W. Lee
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161588584
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
La 4e de couverture indique : "In this book, Chris W. Lee provides a text-critical analysis of the divine death warning in Genesis 2:16-17 in its original context and traces the history of its reception and interpretation within biblical and non-biblical Second Temple Jewish Literature"

The Reaper’s Garden

Author: Vincent Brown
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674298551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Longlisted for the Cundill Prize “Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The Reaper’s Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.”—Ira Berlin From the author of Tacky’s Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire. What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America—and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force. In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica—belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, “mortuary politics” played a consequential role in determining the course of history. Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper’s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.

Garden of Death

Author: Chrystle Fiedler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476748918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
"A bitter battle has sprouted in the village of Greenport on the eve of the annual maritime festival: Willow McQuade has transformed a vacant lot alongside Nature's Way Market & Cafe into a beautiful garden of healing plants--as much a tribute to her late aunt Claire, the shop's beloved founder, as an enlightening educational center. The town board awarded Willow the plot fair and square, but that's not how some folks see it--including Dr. Charles White, who invested in plans to develop a high-end boutique hotel on the property. When the belligerent surgeon publicly threatens Willow during the festival, Jackson Spade ratchets up the hostile confrontation to defend the woman he loves. The seeds of guilt have already taken root by the time Dr. White's corpse turns up among Willow's chamomile and periwinkle plants. To prove Jackson's innocence, she must dig deep to bring a killer to light."--Page [4] cover.

Life and Death in the Garden

Author: Kathryn Meyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442223537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
This compelling book provides a rare glimpse into the heart of wartime China. Kathryn Meyer draws us into the perilous world of the Garden of Grand Vision, a ramshackle structure where a floating population of thousands found shelter from the freezing Siberian winter. They had come to the northern city of Harbin to find opportunity or to escape the turmoil of China in civil war. Instead they found despair. As the author vividly describes, corpses littered the halls waiting for the daily offal truck to cart the bodies away, vermin infested the walls, and relief came in the form of addiction. Yet the Garden also supported a vibrant informal economy. Rag pickers and thieves recycled everything from rat pelts to cigarette butts. Prostitutes entertained clients in the building’s halls and back alleys. These people lived at the very bottom of Chinese society, yet rumors that Chinese spies hid among the residents concerned the Japanese authorities. For this population lived in Manchukuo, the first Japanese conquest in what became the Second World War. Thus, three Japanese police officers were dispatched into the underworld of occupied China to investigate crime and vice in the Harbin slums while their military leaders dragged Japan deeper into the Pacific War. While following these policemen, the reader discovers a remarkable and unexpected view of World War II in East Asia. Instead of recounting battles and military strategy, this book explores the margins of a violent and entrepreneurial society, the struggles of an occupying police force to maintain order, and the underbelly of Japanese espionage. Drawing on the author’s years of rediscovering the historical trail in Manchuria and research based on top-secret Japanese military documents and Chinese memoirs, this book offers a unique and powerful social and cultural history of a forgotten world.

Plants That Kill

Author: Elizabeth A. Dauncey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178763
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
"This richly illustrated book provides an in-depth natural history of the most poisonous plants on earth, covering everything from the lethal effects of hemlock and deadly nightshade to the uses of such plants in medicine, ritual, and chemical warfare"--Dust jacket.