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The main protagonist - who tells the story - is Professor Eustacia Rose, who lives in London. She isn’t currently working, and we quickly learn that some ‘incident’ a year earlier caused her to be suspended from her work as a university lecturer in toxicology. We also quickly discover that she’s on the autistic spectrum. The author cleverly reveals this in a lot of comments, without ever stating it overtly.
Eustacia’s passion - and life work - is based around toxic plants. She has a large collection on her roof garden, which she cares for diligently and with extreme care every day. She sometimes meets a plant dealer who has smuggled a rare specimen; she’s thrilled when a tiny cutting takes root. It’s a little disturbing at first how knowledgeable she is about exactly what each plant would do if ingested or (in some cases) touched, and how pleased she is to acquire new plants.
But it’s also quickly clear that she guards her privacy, and never lets anyone else near her collection. She wears overalls and gloves when she’s tending her plants, and while her descriptions are unemotional, she is horrified at the thought that anyone might have adverse effects from them. And she has done some work on antidotes.
Eustacia has a daily routine, which she barely deviates from. It could have been dull but I liked her ‘voice’, and although she’s a strange person, she’s oddly likeable. She dresses in her father’s old suits, and cares little for her appearance. She does have one habit that bothered me: she has an expensive telescope on her roof garden, which she uses to spy on her neighbours. Mostly it’s curiosity, but she gives some of them creative names based on plants. And there’s one in particular - a young woman - who has several male friends, and Eustacia finds herself attracted to her in a somewhat obsessive way…
The bulk of the story involves an investigation after Eustacia’s garden is vandalised, and someone is murdered. She’s under suspicion for a while, but it’s a testament to the writing that I never really imagined she might be guilty herself - only for a moment did I wonder if the story was going that way. I have to admit I found it difficult to tell apart the handful of male characters who visit the young woman’s flat; none of them feel really three-dimensional although they are described well. But it didn’t matter too much, although I did find myself a bit bewildered by some of the dialogue, and even more by conversations recorded on a neighbour’s phone.
It’s light-hearted in places, with one or two sentences that made me smile. It’s also an excellent insight into the mind of someone who is both highly intelligent and neuro-divergent. She is aware that she’s different from many, and is sometimes puzzled by other people’s emotions. But her father taught her the names of emotions, and suitable reactions when she observed them. And she is highly observant.
There’s a fair amount of tension, and an excellent pace that drew me into Eustacia’s unusual life. There were several times when I wondered where the story would go. There’s rather more detail about specific plants than I wanted (and a glossary at the back, which I discovered at the end, that would be useful in a paperback; not so much on a Kindle. The author is either an expert herself, or did some extensive research. But it was easy enough to skim over the plant details when they were too extensive.
It’s something of a ‘whodunit’, and I very much liked the way that Eustacia and the detective in charge of the case gradually start to develop respect for each other. I was slightly confused at the end, which was left somewhat open; but I gather this is the first of a series about Eustacia Rose, so perhaps something will become clearer in the second book.
Apparently this is also published under the rather less interesting title of ‘The woman in the garden’.
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