THE BLUE ROSE: An English Garden Mystery

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. (Dec. 8)

Forecast: As a member of the American Rose Society who's won Garden Design magazine's Gold Trowel Award for Best Rose Garden in 1995, Eglin is well positioned to reach the garden club set. Blurbs from Ann Ripley and Michael Cady, both authors of gardening cozies, will help cue their readers.