Book 1 · A Restoration Mystery
A Murder in the Marigold Cloister
A cozy garden mystery set in Oaxaca, Mexico — with a touch of romance
Oaxaca · Mexico
Book one takes June to a crumbling courtyard in Oaxaca — and a marigold garden planted over something the town has spent decades refusing to remember.
How do you tend a garden grown from a grief nobody will name?
A restoration commission sends June Rowan to Oaxaca City just as it fills with marigolds and candlelight for Día de los Muertos. The Convento de Nuestra Señora de las Campanas has spent two centuries certain of one thing: the nun who once tended its cloister garden stole from it and vanished. June isn’t so sure the story holds up. Neither, it turns out, is the woman funding the restoration.
Overgrown beds keep offering up things that don’t fit the official account — and when asking old questions turns newly dangerous, June realises someone in the convent’s orbit would rather the garden stayed buried. Restoring it and clearing a name written out of its own story turn out to be the same job. She’s done harder ones. Probably.
Between June and Edmund, the photographer she can’t quite stop sparring with, there’s the kind of slow-burn warmth that neither of them is ready to call anything at all. A Xolo dog with no opinions and excellent timing shadows her through the cloister.
A closed-door, clean cozy mystery for armchair travellers — an amateur sleuth, a garden with secrets, a city you’ll want to book a flight to, and a wrong that’s waited two hundred years to be righted.
Book 1 of the June Rowan Restoration Mysteries — cozy garden mysteries set in beautiful places around the world, for readers who’d rather be somewhere else. Starts with the prequel, A Murder on the Jacaranda Coast, free for Postcards subscribers.
- Slow Burn
- Amateur Sleuth
- Buried Grief
- Body in a Charming Place
- Forced Proximity
- Found Family
- A Garden With Secrets
- Second Chance at Love
why this place
Oaxaca in the days around Día de los Muertos is the most alive place I’ve ever stood in — marigolds everywhere, and grief worn openly in the streets. The convent, its history and the crime are invented; the way a city holds its dead close is not.
For readers of H.Y. Hanna, Verity Bright, and T.A. Williams.
Featured in 5 Mystery Books Set in Mexico .
