Book Review: The Plot Thickets by Julia Henry (Garden Squad Mysteries #5)

Stars: 3 out of 5

Pros: Lilly and the rest of the regular characters

Cons: The plot needed some pruning

The Bottom Line:

Cemetery plot

Kick starts this mystery book

Great seeing the gang

Fresh Body in the Cemetery

I love summer, so this time of year is hard for me as we face waning sunlight and temperatures that are dropping.  So it was nice to visit Lilly Jayne and the rest of the Garden Squad in The Plot Thickets since, for them, it’s spring and they are looking forward to great weather ahead of them.

If you haven’t met the Garden Squad yet, they are a group of mostly senior citizens in Goosebush, Massachusetts.  Lilly Jayne and her family have been leaders in the small town for generations, and now Lilly leads this group of her friends in helping to make the town more beautiful with official and unofficial landscaping projects around town.

Lilly has received a suggestion that the Garden Squad look at the historic cemetery because some of the areas have been neglected.  When Lilly and Delia head out there one afternoon, they find more problems than they were expecting.  Yes, some areas desperately need to be weeded and tended to in other ways.  But Lilly also finds more graves than she is expecting to see in the middle of historic family plots.  While she isn’t completely sure if she can trust her memory or not, she begins to investigate.  When a fresh body turns up above ground near the Jayne family’s crypt, Lilly starts digging deeper.  Can she find what happened?

I love these characters.  The Garden Squad is a diverse group, and they each bring something to the story and help get to the truth using their own skill set.  I love that.  Yes, Lilly is our main character, and we see the story through her third person point of view.  But the groups bond makes this series feel so cozy.  That does extend to the rest of the regular supporting cast even though they play smaller roles in the story.  Likewise, the suspects are strong and kept me guessing until the end.

Unfortunately, the plot could have used some pruning.  This has been a constant theme for me in the series, but it is worse here than normal.  While there are things happening early on we know will lead somewhere, there are some repeated scenes that could have been cut out to speed things up a little.  Yes, there is a good and enjoyable mystery here, and I didn’t figure it out until the end.

As always, the book has some gardening tips at the end.  I don’t have a green thumb at all and I live in a condo, so the tips don’t do much for me.  But if you are trying to get a garden going, you’ll want to take a look at them.

It was great to spend time with Lilly and the rest of the regulars again.  I really do love Goosebush and the friends I’ve made there.  I just wish the plot in The Plot Thickets had been a little thicker.

Enjoy the rest of the Garden Squad Mysteries.

NOTE: I received an ARC of this book.