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BINDWEED
by Janis Harrison
St Martin's Minotaur, November 2005
256 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312348134


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Florist Bretta Solomon is having a nice life -- at last. A widow, she used her husband's insurance money as a down payment on a mansion in River City, Missouri, with a view to turning the place into a boarding house. Her father, who abandoned the family when Bretta was a child, has moved in and is doting on a new girlfriend who is to redecorate the mansion.

Bretta is enjoying a relaxing day with beau Bailey Monroe, a former undercover DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent, when her housekeeper summons her to the phone. Toby Sutton, the young man with learning difficulties who did odd jobs for the merchants of Hawthorn Street, is in the hospital. A hornet's nest was rigged to the door of his bedroom, and he has been stung many times by the angry insects. He does not survive.

Bretta is determined to find out who killed Toby, an innocuous innocent, beloved by all those for whom he washed windows, swept sidewalks and so on. But before her investigation gets underway, one of the merchants of Hawthorn Street is murdered. Leona Harper, owner of a fancy boutique, is brought to the hospital, covered in lumps from poison ivy, something to which she was severely allergic. The poison had been ingested into her bubble bath.

Ultimately, Bretta and Abigail, the decorator, who turns out to be Bretta's half sister, go on a mission of discovery, which leads them into a most improbable dilemma.

While Bretta, her assistants, and her fellow Hawthorn Street merchants are well defined characters, the most fully realized are two dead people. Agnes Sutton, Toby's mother, who suffered from cancer, attempts to control every aspect of his life from beyond the grave.

She left strict instructions about the meals he was to eat, that he was not to watch television, and that he was to plant flowers "just so" every year. Bretta discovers that the owner of the local video store took Toby under his wing and introduced him to junk food, TV, and movie rentals, a new world in which Toby reveled.

There is far more than we need to know about spiders, and the chapter in which Bretta and Abigail confront the murderer, who maunders endlessly about spiders and fabric and research into converting plants to fabric, is too boring for words.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, May 2006

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