Review by Booklist Review
Herbal-shop owner China Bayles returns in the third installment of this successful series. Exhausted after a busy Christmas season, China is happy to accept an offer to accompany her friend Maggie on a two-week retreat to the remote St. Theresa's monastery in West Texas, home for a contemplative order of nuns and famous for its rocambole garlic. With her own cottage overlooking the Yucca River, China contemplates a blissful stay until she finds out that Maggie has ulterior motives. An arsonist is at work in the monastery along with a poison-pen letter writer--all of which appears to be motivated by an attempt to change St. Theresa's into a posh conference center for the higher clergy, a plan made possible by its recent windfall inheritance from a wealthy benefactor. When China realizes that one of the sisters may be the perpetrator, things get quite uncomfortable. A well-plotted mystery with strong characters and a wonderfully realized setting. --Stuart Miller
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Early in this intelligent addition to herbalist China Bayles's adventures (Thyme of Death; Rosemary Remembered), one character laments that she has given up reading about women detectives because they are all "Raymond Chandler in drag.... Lotta guts, no soul." Wittig takes up the challenge, showing how to do it right with quiet humor and only an occasional overload of introspection. Exhausted by the Christmas season and her new roommates, love interest Mike McQuaid and his 12-year-old son, China takes off for a retreat at St. Theresa's Monastery in Texas's remote and wild Yucca River country with friend Maggie Garrett, a former nun. In spite of its tranquil appearance, the religious order is in a state of turmoil. Having received a legacy worth millions, St. Theresa's has merged with another order which wants to use the money to open a high-powered retreat center. The two sides are hopelessly deadlocked when the Reverend Mother, the tie-breaking vote, dies mysteriously. China agrees to look into the death. Her investigation quickly takes on urgency when threatening events ensue: someone shoots at her, some small fires are set and she finds the deadly herb rue growing in the garden. Even when the stakes seem too high or unlikely for ordinary life, Wittig manages to make them mostly believable, mainly because China's character is credible (when she makes a mistake, she gets embarrassed). Albert gives readers a page-turner and soul to spare. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Delightful series sleuth China Bayles, owner of a small-town herb shop, is vexed by troubles at a Texas convent where the mother superior has just died. More quality diversion from the author of Thyme of Death (LJ 10/1/92). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Holy rocambole! The nuns at St. Theresa's are fighting tooth and nail over the candidate for abbess and the fate of the abbey. The issues evenly divided between the Sisters of the Holy Heart, who are content to sit on the $7 million bequest they got from the Laney Foundation and tend their harvest of rocambole garlic, and the Sisters of St. Agatha, who have been moved to St. Theresa's from a Texas conference center and want to use all that Laney cash to turn the abbey into another hot spot. The race between garlic-loving Sister Gabriella and conference center manager Sister Olivia will be determined by a majority vote. But attorney-turned-herbalist China Bayles, visiting the abbey to retreat from the hectic world and look into some suspicious fires and accusatory anonymous letters while she's in retreat, wonders if the deaths of pioneer Laney legatee Mother Hilaria and ailing old Sister Perpetua aren't the work of somebody who's trying to gerrymander the election. A cryptic note in Mother Hilaria's diary reads, ``Sr. A, letter. Questioned Sr. R & Sr. O,'' clearly refers to Sister Olivia, but which is Sister R--Rose, Ruth, Rachel, Rosabel, Rosaline, Rowena, Ramona, Regina, or John Roberta? And can China unglue herself from her one-time squeeze Tom Rowan, now managing St. Theresa's trust fund, long enough to dope it out? The unsentimental look at convent life makes up for the near-invisibility of China (Rosemary Remembered, 1995, etc.). But not even Albert's way with a telling phrase can bring all those Sister R`s to life.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
