Customer Reviews

The Blue Rose: An English Garden Mystery

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When Kate and Alex Sheppard move into their dream house - a 19th century cottage complete with a walled garden - they make an exciting discovery - a rose bush in their garden sports blue flowers! Kate, a gardening enthusiast, knows that this mysterious rose could bring them worldwide fame and fortune. They try to remain calm and decide to seek advice from a botany professor and a lawyer. Despite their best efforts however, the secret is soon out, and the couple find themselves badgered by determined opportunists clamoring for the rose and a nightmare that includes kidnapping and murder.

This is Eglin's debut novel and it is a delightful page-turner. Gardeners will love the horticultural details thrown in and mystery fans will appreciate the well-paced plot and the author's attention to detail and believable dialog. This is an author to keep an eye on!

I really wanted to like this book because I love mysteries and gardening, and the author seems like a nice guy. However, by halfway through I was turning pages as fast as I could, not because it's a page-turner but because I wanted to be done with it. As another reviewer mentioned, the book is full of cliches and one-note good guys/bad guys. Poor dialogue, excessive irrelevant details, awkward use of Britishisms, and thoroughly unbelievable behavior on the part of the husband during the last part of the book (humorous comments on the weather, for example) made this hard to read. Definitely a 'first novel' - maybe he'll get better as he goes on.

From the moment they saw the Parsonage in the English village of Steeple Tarrant Alex and Kate Sheppard knew they found their dream house. Once they moved in, Alex and Kate work to fix the huge neglected gardens and soon find hidden under other plants a blue rose. Kate knows it must be very valuable because scientists have tried for decades without success to create one. They contact Doctor Lawrence Kingston who is an expert on roses and ask him to provide his expert opinion.

When he sees the rose, he advises them to get a lawyer to handle all the buyers that will want to purchase the flowery gem. They decide to put it up for auction but before that can happen, two businessmen desperate for money call and try to get the rose. The Sheppards refuse to talk to them and refer them to their lawyer. Someone is desperate enough to kidnap Kate and hold her for ransom in exchange for the rose. The only problem is Alex no longer has it because someone has stolen it.

THE BLUE ROSE is an exciting amateur sleuth mystery that will appeal to people who love to garden and those readers who don't like a lot of gore and blood in their who-done-it. The protagonists are beleaguered from every side by folks who will stop at nothing to get THE BLUE ROSE. What nobody knows is that the flower has an unexpected property that makes it dangerous. Anthony Eglin has written a wonderful garden mystery that like many vines takes a lot of unexpected twists and turns.

Harriet Klausner

" The Blue Rose" is a somewhat typical British cozy. There is a village, a garden, an amateur sleuth, and, of course a murder. What makes or brakes this type of mystery are characters. Are they vivid or cardboard? In this book, unfortunately they are not very interesting or complex. Good people are goody two shoes, and bad people are just mean ogres.
In all fairness I found this book to be a pleasent, albeit average read. I might try another one in this series. Mr. Eglin might get the hang of it.

This was the first of Eglin's books that I read, and it took me awhile to realize that the main character was the rosarian rather than the young couple. It was fast paced andleft me eager for more.

I picked up this book on a whim. I didn't know the author, but since I am a gardener and I enjoy mysteries and the reviews on the cover were favorable, I thought I would enjoy it.

The first few chapters were ok, interesting premise, likable characters, but after that it degenerated into a mawkish mess, with cliches that usually only tacky romance writers use.

Example: "It's only a flesh wound" says Alex about his friend being shot in the leg. And other gems such as "The man collapsed under the jarring impetus of Alex's perfectly executed rugby tackle." (As far as we know Alex doesn't play rugby, so why is it a rugby tackle?)and "What a stroke of luck it had been, her eavesdropping just at that very moment.":read ...needed a way to move the plot along.

This seemed very amatuerish to me and I am quited disappointed in Publisher Weekly and the Washington Post for recommending it.

If you like Anthony Eglin's style, you will love this one. A little more complex than the others, but so, so good. I loan my books to family and friends, but don't loan my Eglin's :-)

I first met Anthony Eglin's style of writing through the Mystery of the Wild Rose. It was a style I was not used to, and while it did take a good chapter to settle in, by the time I finished I was hot on the trail in search of another A.E. novel! After reviewing the others through this website, I decided to try The Blue Rose next. I was SO pleased to find another such pleasant read. My thought is that if you liked The Cat Who series, by Lilian Jackson Braun, you might enjoy this series, as well. They're both light, enjoyable reads, but A.E. would appeal to gardeners who like light reads. You could say the difference between tea, and coffee, but I'm not sure that wouldn't be too trite a comparison. I loved it, and that settles it! Well, not quite, because now I have to buy another....

"The Blue Rose" is a great mystery novel and a great summer read. The story is brought to life with rich detail and interesting characters. This is a must read for anyone who enjoys a good mystery!