The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

I love Italy and anything to do with its history and culture and I think this is what led me to read this book. The author, Mark Mills is a graduate of Camridge University and has himself lived in Italy. His first and only other novel The Whaleboat House won the Crime Writer's Association Award for Best Novel by a debut author in 2004; another one to add to my TBR list!
The Savage Garden is set in Tuscany in 1958; the protagonist Adam Strickland, a Cambridge scholar is sent to the Villa Docci in order to use its memorial garden as the subject of his impending thesis.
As Adam unravels the secrets hidden within the garden he also discovers that the current members of the Docci family have things to hide. There are two separate stories of love, jealousy, revenge and murder separated by 400 years which lead Adam into the Docci family's tangled web.

I was totally gripped by this book, it is a great murder mystery but it also offers so much more. Mills has created Villa Docci and its gardens perfectly. The descriptions are beautifully vivid with all the undertones of darkness and mystery needed to keep the reader interested. As I said earlier on in the week I do like it when books lead you directly on to others; Mills uses Dante's The Divine Comedy as a strong theme within Adam's discoveries and I found this particulalry interesting. I have only ever read excerpts of The Divine Comedy but I do now want to take the time to read the whole book but I may just have a little break and some Daphne Du Maurier first!

Comments

Booking Through Thursday

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