Back to the Garden

<b>A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life&#151;with potentially fatal consequences&#151;in this gripping standalone novel from the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.</b><br><br><b>ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>PopSugar</i></b><br><br>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.<br><br>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&#146;s past: a human skull hidden away for decades.<br><br>Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago the Estate&#146;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&#151;monsters like The Highwayman whose case has just surged back into the public eye.<br><br>Could the skull belong to one of his victims?<br><br>To Raquel&#151;a woman who knows all about colorful pasts&#151;the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate&#146;s archives to look for signs of his presence what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.<br><br>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.<br><br>But&#160;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&#146;s brother Fort.<br><br>The pressure is on and Raquel needs to solve this case&#151;before The Highwayman slips away or another Gardener vanishes.