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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In his excellent debut, Eglin combines just the right amount of horticultural detail with well-drawn characters and an absorbing plot. While Kate and Alex Sheppard explore the long neglected gardens of the Parsonage, their newly acquired, 19th-century Wiltshire country house, they discover an astonishing plant—a rose bush with blue flowers ("Not lavender or mauve, but an electric sapphire blue"). For help, the couple turn to Lawrence Kingston, a noted rose authority and incidentally a crossword puzzle aficionado, and Christopher Adell, their London legal adviser. In spite of their efforts to research the plant in secret, word of the extraordinary find gets out, and the likable Sheppards are soon mixed up with secret codes and missing journals and threatened by vicious hybridizers from Japan and the United States, as well as local growers and supposed friends. Mysterious deaths, a kidnapping, a chase and various shootings add to the suspense. Apt gardening quotations, from Edmund Spenser to Dale Carnegie, introduce each chapter.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If you love roses, or gardening, or British mysteries, you will probably love this novel, lush with the lore and lure of all three. Eglin, a Californian and award-winning rose gardener, writes well of what he knows. Unfortunately, he is less skilled in the essentials of fiction writing: plot, dialogue, and characterization add up to not much in this first novel. Kate and Alex buy their dream cottage in Wiltshire, called the Parsonage, with its two-acre walled garden overrun with roses. What they find in a corner is the impossible: a sapphire-blue rose. Although they immediately contact a gardening expert and an attorney, they are plunged into a world of conniving relatives, rose pollination recorded in Enigma code, evil American and sneaky Japanese executives, and the mysterious death of a friend who handled the rose. It's melodramatic and the dialogue is terrible, but the rosarian detail is irresistible. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The brand-new Bill Slider Mystery - David Rogers was a doctor, handsome, charming and rich. He lived the lifestyle of a consultant – expensive clothes, top restaurants, exclusive clubs – until someone killed him in the hallway of his lovely million-plus-pound house. But when Bill Slider and his firm are thrown into the mystery, they soon discover that nothing is as it seems, for though David's girlfriends are plenty, none of them can tell Slider anything about where he worked or what exactly he did . . .

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Harald Sigurdsson, brother of the defeated King of Norway, travels to Byzantium and serves in the Emperor's viking Varangian Guard.

Could Becky’s life get any worse? As though finding out her fiancé had been unfaithful on the day of her wedding wasn’t bad enough, now her holiday in Cornwall is at risk of being ruined by a group of lads on a stag weekend. All she wants is to be left in peace to lick her wounds. Surely that isn’t too much to ask? But when the tide rolls in and leaves her stranded on the beach, assistance arrives from a most unexpected quarter. Who is the mysterious Luke and why won't he tell her anything about himself? Trapped on the cliff, Becky's about to find out what it really means to be caught between a rock and a hard place...

Kimberly Tucker's life hasn't turned out the way she thought it would. A divorced mother of two, Kim resents her ex-husband for moving on with his life and living it up while she struggles to understand what went wrong. When her sons end up spending five weeks of summer vacation with their father, Kim's own father suggests a respite in the family vacation home on tiny Cedar Key Island. As Kim revisits her childhood memories and loves, she soon discovers that treasures in life are often buried, and mistakes—both past and present—become redeemable in God's hand.

Readers will be swept away to an island retreat where they walk alongside Kim as she discovers that God's answers may not come easily, but they do come.

Noren knew that his world was not as it should be -- it was wrong that only the Scholars, and their representatives the Technicians, could use metal tools and Machines. It was wrong that only they had access to the mysterious City, which even in boyhood he had longed to enter. Above all, it was wrong for the Scholars to have sole power over the distribution of knowledge. The High Law imposed these restrictions and many others, though the Prophecy declared that someday knowledge and Machines would be available to everyone. Noren was a heretic. He had now come to believe in the Prophecy's fulfillment, yet the more he learned of the grim truth about his people's deprivations, the less possible it seemed that their world could ever be changed. Was it right to keep on promising them a brighter future?