An all-expenses paid weekend at an upstate hotel with her oldest friend seems like a good idea to Paula Holliday. After all, gardening season doesn’t really kick in for another few weeks and she and Lucy Cavanaugh haven’t had a chance to catch up since they worked together in the television business. Besides, the hotel is playing host to a rare corpse flower which is just about to bloom. But when Lucy doesn’t show up and a dead guy does, it seems like less of a good idea.

 

Add some Ukrainian mobsters, a pair of ladykilling brothers, a bankrupt businessmen and a group of college kids who know how to party, and Paula has her hands full trying to find her friend and figure out what it is that everyone seems to think she knows . . .

Thirtyish former television exec Paula Holliday relocates from New York City to sleepy Springfield, CT, determined to turn her passion for gardening into a new, less stressful career.

 

When an eccentric spinster dies, her landmark property is left to the local Historical Society, and Paula sees the garden’s restoration as a way to get her fledgling business off the ground. She’s prepared for everything, but not for the mummified baby she digs up her first day on the job. After a cursory investigation, the local police decide it’s an old secret, not a recent crime, so they drop the matter, but . . . Paula’s not so sure.

 

Casual snooping turns serious when someone is impaled on a garden tool and one of Paula’s helpers is arrested for the crime. Aided by the still-hot aging rocker who owns the local greasy spoon, a Shakespeare-quoting massage therapist, and a handsome Mexican laborer with a few secrets of his own, Paula unearths more dirt the suburban town has kept buried.

 

Rounding out the cast, and among the suspects, a randy Congressman and his gin-swigging mother, an amoral newspaper reporter, an octogenarian ladies’ man, childhood sweethearts reunited after 50 years, and a tattooed lady you wouldn’t want to mess with.