The Garden of Blue Roses

Ominous fantastic and wonderfully malevolent.... I felt the spirits of Shirley Jackson Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Camus Meursault whispering to join the fun.-- Alice Sebold best-selling and award-winning author of The Lovely BonesA car lies at the bottom of an icy ravine. Slumped over the steering wheel dead is the most critically acclaimed horror writer of his time. Was it an accident? His son Milo doesnt care. For the first time in his life hes free. No more nightmarish readings spooky animal rites or moonlit visions of his father in the woods with a notebook and vampire make-up.Or so he thinks.Milo settles into a quiet routine--constructing model Greek warships and at last building a relationship with his sister Klara whos home after a failed marriage and brief career as an English teacher. Then Klara hires a gardener to breathe new life into their overgrown estate. Theres something odd about him--something eerily reminiscent of their fathers most violent villain. Or is Milo imagining things? Hes not sure. That all changes the day the gardener discovers something startling in the woods. Suddenly Milo is fighting for his life forced to confront the power of fictional identity as he uncovers the shocking truth about his own dysfunctional family--and the supposed accident that claimed his parents lives.[A] taut mystery about how the lives we lead are forever changed by the stories we tell and the secrets we keep. -- Ramona Ausubel award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us[T]his rich neo-gothic novel...captures us with an eerie power exactly like Henry James governess and the stressed-out dreamy extremists of Poe. Milo the son the brother the watcher the spy had my sleeve fiercely in his fist the whole way. -- Ron Carlson award-winning author of Five Skies[B]rilliantly probes the authorship of horror in its many arenas: history war parenting nature love the imagination. -- Michelle Latiolais award-winning author of Widow and She.