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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar
A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: the Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.
And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home’s past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.
Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate’s young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents—monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.
Could the skull belong to one of his victims?
To Raquel—a woman who knows all about colorful pasts—the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate’s archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.
Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.
But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob’s brother, Fort.
The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case—before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 6, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593496572
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593496572
- File size: 6658 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 1, 2022
In a stand-alone departure from King's New York Times best-selling "Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes" series, a decades-old skull has been found at Gardener Estate, a grand mansion on sweeping grounds long owned by an influential California family. Inspector Raquel Laing of the SFPD Cold Case Unit must look back to the Seventies, when young heir Rob Gardener re-created the mansion as a commune from which folks began disappearing. Were they victims of the serial killer known as the Highwayman?
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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July 4, 2022
At the start of this intricately plotted mystery from bestseller King (the Mary Russell series), Insp. Raquel Laing, who’s with the San Francisco PD’s Cold Case Unit, arrives at the Gardener Estate near Palo Alto—once the home of one of California’s most influential families—where the remains of a long-buried body have been found on the grounds. Laing believes that the victim may be one of the young women murdered in the Bay Area in the 1970s by a serial killer known as the Highwayman. Flashbacks to the late 1970s show how Rob Gardener, then the estate’s multimillionaire owner, turned it into a commune. The loosely knit and ever-changing community included Meadow, “a hippie earth-mother with the political skills of a Chicago mayor,” and “a Mephistopheles rock star” known as Rain. Could the killer have some connection with the Gardener family? King skillfully misdirects the reader as the action builds to a surprising resolution. Laing, dubbed “the Sherlock of San Francisco” by her colleagues “for her uncanny ability to put together unrelated facts,” is a welcome addition to the ranks of contemporary female detectives. Hopefully, she’ll be back for an encore. Agent: Alec Shane, Writers House.
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