Back to the garden : a novel

King, Laurie R.2022

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Summary

The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California--and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities within their walls. And now, just as the turmoil seems buried and the Estate prepares to move into a new future, construction work unearths a grim relic of the estate's history: a skull, hidden away some fifty years ago. Inspector Raquel Laing of the SFPD Cold Case Unit has her work cut out for her. Back in the '70s, the Estate was a commune, when its young heir, Rob Gardener, turned the palatial setting into a counterculture Eden of peace, love, and equality. But the '70s were also a time when serial killers preyed on such innocents--monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just assumed a whole new urgency. Could these bones belong to one of his victims? For Raquel Laing--a woman who knows all about hidden turmoil and eccentricities--the Gardener bones seem clearly linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives for evidence of his presence, what she finds there begins to take on a dark reality of its own. Everything brings her back to Rob Gardener himself--now a gray-haired recluse, then a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate, fifty years ago. But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer, when the commune fell apart and its residents scattered: a young woman, her child, Rob's brother Fort... The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case--before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.