Product Description

No one could ever accuse Jane Jeffry or her equally green-thumbless best friend Shelly Nowack of being modern reicarnations of Luther Burbank. Their ineptitude in all things vegatative has inspired them to sign up for a botany class at the local community center, even though the gods of gardening seem to be warning Jane to steer clear.

Jane trips on a curb and badly bangs up her foot, but his gamely hobbles to class on crutches and in a cast, only to learn that the glamorous and celebrated microbiologist teacher, Julie Jackson, has been beaten into a coma by a person or persons unknown. But the class must go on, even though the substitute teacher, Dr. Stewart Eastman, is the arrogant creator of his patented plant species and more interested in his personal ambition to achieve botanical fame and fortune than imparting knowledge or a love of gardening. He's propaganding only his ego and his latest floral coup.

When a murder occurs, there's and abundant crop of suspects in the class, Is the perp who plants a body in Dr. Eastman's compost pile the conspiracy nut Ursula Appledorn, who's' convinced that they are being stalked by a cabal involving the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Queen Elizabeth, and the French Dauphin? Or maybe the obsessively tidy computer nerd Charles Jones? Or the milquetoast widoer Arnold Waring? Perhaps it's the terrifying knowledgeable Miss Martha Winstead with her strong opinions on gardening?

Jane's beau, police detective Mel VanDyne, who admits to a secret longing to drive dieselpowered earth-moving equipment, is on the case, but hasn't seen the gardens the classmates have created -- wherein flourishes the floral clue to the grimy crime. Jane's afraid he'll pluck out the wrong suspect.

And Jane, her nuisance injury ignored, is willing to get her gardening gloves, and Shelly's as well, dirty to uneath the gardener who's responsible for one bashing and one buried.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1747004 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-01
• Released on: 2000-11-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The title of this 12th Jane Jeffry gardening mystery from Macavity and Agatha Award-winner Churchill (Grime and Punishment; A Farewell to Yarns; etc.) says it all, as the crime element is almost an afterthought. When Jane and neighbor Shelley Nowack sign up for a gardening class at their local community center, they end up with a substitute, the pompous Dr. Stewart Eastman, after an unknown intruder sneaks into the home of the regular teacher, Julie Jackson, and knocks her out, leaving her in a coma. Suspects in the attack include everyone taking the gardening class: fastidious computer programmer Charles Jones, persnickety librarian Martha Winstead, lonely widower Arnie Waring and loony aging hippie Ursula Appledorn. But in this leisurely, talky tale, Jane is less concerned with crime solving than with visiting the gardens of her classmates, tending to her injured foot, worrying about her teenage son's unsuitable girlfriend and buying herself a new TV for her bedroom. Only near the end does a murder occurDDr. Eastman is found strangled with green twine in a compost pileDafter which Churchill brings the plot to a tidy conclusion, with the killer's motive turning on Dr. Eastman's patented pink marigolds. While Jane and Shelley make plenty of wry social comments, there's too little sleuthing going on for this cozy to appeal to anyone except gardeners and already established fans. (Dec. 1)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Jane Jeffry is definitely a cozy sort: her best friend, Shelly, lives next door, and her kids are adolescent but adorable. In this latest adventure, Jane's boyfriend, Mel the detective, is mostly offstage. Shelly and Jane sign up for a gardening class, but their lecturer, a plant researcher, is severely beaten before it begins. The class goes forward anyway, with a supercilious replacement and an assortment of broadly drawn but vivid types: a take-no-prisoners elderly librarian, a martinet whose pant creases match his tortuous garden geometry, a befuddled fellow who can't get over the death of his wife, a conspiracy freak, and so on. When the offensive replacement lecturer is found dead in his own garden, Jane and Shelly find digging up the connections among these folks to be irresistible. Jane is only slightly hampered by a broken foot, and this time she even treats herself to a TV in the bedroom. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Jill Churchill creates domestic malice with a deft pen." -- -- Carolyn Hart

Customer Reviews

Is it a Lemon? (No. It's NOT a clunker car; it's a WINNAH!) Is it Lemonade? (Maybe. Yum.) Is it Hot? Is it Cold?
It's Jane Jeffry, Amazon housewife!

Mulch has it all. Hot toddy for your soul; cool for your jets. This author covers your escape reading bets (and includes satisfying sleuthing).

The lemon yellow cover with stalking cat captured my winter-edge need to slow down and do nothing.

When I picked up my copy of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, the sunny yellow cover stuck to my soul craving dawn. A happy surge flooded the dark spots in my mind when I decided to temporarily table the "earn-my-keep" work in progress, and begin reading that book. I had missed Jane and wanted her light touch with fun, snarly undercurrents, and the play in quirky friendship with her neighbor, Shelley. The notes exchanged on their houses' doors gave an intriguing, quick entry into the story, and the irony of a wrong delivery (of flowers) and the machinations from that were genius plot ploys. The tension building between Jane, Shelley, and Mel were great stick-to-ribs for enhancing and percolating the story as well.

Loved the side-plots of Jill's solving mood problems, her own and her kids (sending Katie to a cooking school), and the compassion Jill shows for Arnie's grieving his late wife, even though she had to stretch her own views to realize his experience with death of a spouse was different from hers.

Insights into gardening were well beyond 101. This side(sub)-plot dug into genetics and patents for new breeds, and it excavated with entertainment rather than trenching the reader in ennui. Not being a gardener, I was surprised at how interesting the green thumb stuff could be, and how it tunneled through the plots, like ground-hogs in hay days. Ah, ah, ahchhooooo.

Of course, Churchill always gives the reader enough subplots to keep the story percolating, always at the edge of the pops, gurgles, and hisses of a drip coffee pot ending its cycle, giving sound to the anticipation of a fresh, hot drink craved with every surge of hope which comes with sunrise and spring.

Another of these subplots, one upon which much of the plot percolation pivots, launched with Churchill's usual spicy, easy flow syntax:

>> "They're (the flowers) probably evidence, Jane said, turning on her heal dramatically to get back into the car. She tripped over the curb and came down hard on her right foot, and her shoe turned sideways with a sickening popping noise that made her yelp involuntarily. Mel set down the flowers and he and Shelley rushed to scoop her up. <<

Throughout this plot Jane was on crutches with a cast reaching almost up to her eyeballs. At first she openly relished being able to soak up sympathy and give herself a break, using the cast as an excuse, and it was certainly a legitimate one. A TV in the bedroom was the main side effect splurge, after which she slipped into a heroine mode of getting around the crutch & debilitation, carrying on with her life and responsibilities at near full speed. Then the other characters got the bashes and bruises (from getting in the way of Jane's flying crutch).

Prior to Jane's "slip, fall, crash, and burn" her pride had been heated so badly, she had leaped out of a blush-inducing, stainless-steel frying pan into a hotter, heavier, cast-iron one (this is a metaphor mixed into the other cast, not of characters, but the one covering Jane's foot, shin, and thigh). The pushed pride thing had hit the fan full swing after Mel snapped at Jane when he found her at a murder scene, and snarled that her presence at a crime scene was "gawking." Of course, on THIS rare occasion Jane & Shelley had been innocently and sweetly delivering flowers to a neighbor who (as the ladies didn't know yet) just happened to be dead (flowers which would blossom into the gardening prime-subplot and which had been delivered to Jane's address by mistake). Who knew?

Literally and figuratively on the ground for all the above reasons, Jane was provided (by Jill) with her usual self-honesty:

>> Jane felt like crying, not because her foot was hurting horribly, but because she had made a big fool of herself by flouncing off like that. <<

Love the precision of the word, "flouncing," and its alliteration with "fool."

These are the types of descriptions which Jill so naturally slips into the flow of things, they give their effects effortlessly; Churchill's plots don't plod, they percolate. Like that drip coffee pot popping its cycle end mentioned above.

What with all my metaphor mixing, I really should get an electric beater, the kind with the huge, heavy bowl held-in-place by a swivel plate. This hand grinder is probably giving me carpel tunnel, or whatever you call that ailment, especially when I'm using the heck out of the hand beater simultaneous to typing like the mad woman I am. I, too, can use it or lose it. If I'm able to figure out what it was I was using, or losing. Probably my long lost train of thought.

Whoo, whoo. Toot. Toot.

Okay. That was enough. I'm done tooting my horn now. Back to the coffee pot. Ahhhh... Sip.

Check my review of Cleo Coyle's "On What Grounds," for proof of my insanity. Slurp. That novel would be a great follow-up to Mulch; you could put pink daisies in your coffee pot, then weed the roses and drink the steaming brew vicariously, like I live life.

I'm not really here in any fleshy, breathy sort of way. Lost my Proof of Existence Papers the other day. They went "Poof!" into the ozone during one of my nearly continuous flights there (I made the hole once when I sneezed). So bear with me as I bare my soul while I'm trying to relocate my ID, as I munch vicariously and precariously one of Joanne Fluke's chocolate chip cookies. Her Cookie Jar shop is right around the corner (where I'm holding as hostage one of my reviews on the Hannah Swensen series, trying to find my cached X-Files spotlight).

Well, what do you expect, this is a culinary review of a cozy mystery. Both came out of the oven, fresh, hot, and ... burning my hands! Oooochhhh! Those pot holders are for what?

Gotta go reread my reviews on EO's (Essential Oils) to find out what works for burns. Oh, yeah, aloe. Need to put that in my Listmana.

I should issue a warning to not get used to my silly, sudsy, dud-ly humor.

I live on the edge of the banana peels littering my kitchen tiles, but as a moody person, sometimes I get tired of slipping, and execute some serious housecleaning (in my dreams). So, as soon as you get used to something in my many modes of style (and the high class syntax up my a..); as soon as you begin craving more of something, that's exactly when my mood will change and I'll leave you high, dry, and pounding the table. Chust (I review Amish, too) don't go to Amazon and rip my off-base moods, already. I can be as dangerous as Stephen King to people who don't praise my work to high heaven, though low heaven is acceptable once in a while. Believe me. I'm BAD. Yes. (At 58 yrs old it isn't easy to maintain a bad-gal facade, especially when I'm hiding such a genuinely sweet sensitivity.)

Asides simmering aside (in my witch's cast-iron kettle; I do curses, too, but I make them fizzle before they flop), this is another delightful read from Churchill with an entertainingly fascinating sideline of gardening genetics, which is explained and dramatized with just enough depth to be comprehended easily with a kick of advanced flavor (it's not labor intensive, no plucky or puky puns are intended). Yum.

So, what do you do with mulch? Use it, or lose it (as it decays into Sacred Fertilizer, which is my lady's term for Holy S...). Scarab Beetles do know what they're about as they burrow into their own dung. How could they not? Being from Egypt should give anything an edge in the ancient-wisdom, sphinx games, due to proximity to The Great Pyramid. Maybe I should go there to write my next mystery series? (And not return until I get a grip on my keyboard?)

Going, going, gone. Lost it. Maybe I'll find whatever "it" is before I write another review. Maybe I should snooze a while first. But, isn't that when you're supposed to lose?

What's that white corner over there under the leg of my bar stool, which is perched on my black-and-white, ceramic tile, fictional floor? Oh. Wow. It looks like the Proof I've been looking for, the geometric one which will give me a clue, maybe even two. Who am I? That Paper says it all!

Burp. Bending over. Streeeeeettttcchhhing...

CRASH!

Oh no! Oh dear. Oh my.

I'm NOT getting a type cast, or an iron cast (or would that be clad?), or a ... whatever. Thank heaven I just ran out of words.

Read Jill Churchill's Jane Jeffry. You'll never run out of anything you need. A Staple. That's what she is. Like sugar for your coffee. Cream for your tea. Lemons for your ade. And I don't mean that tool for holding pages together, though she has that, too. It's called a publisher. That's what I need. Jill? Don't run and hide! I'm CHUST kidding!

But, I'm serious when I rave Jane Jeffry. I'm deadly serious when I rave any murder mystery. You'd better believe it. That's a threat by Stephen King's apprentice.

Shut my mouth! Before I spout a curse and regret it.

Gritting teeth, clamping lips (that makes a grimace, not a grin), oh man, I've gone too far.

Off the edge, I leap,
Linda G. Shelnutt

P.S. You may never hear from me again. Don't ask if that's a warning, a curse, or a threat. I'm not Stephen, yet. He, he, he. Heh. So mote it be (all in good fun).

Enjoyable enough
Todd was at soccer camp, the cooking lessons were to keep Ursula away, who cares what Shelley's husband was doing? Or Jane's in-laws? Or if a murder doesn't actually happen until late in the book? It's still got a mystery in it! I liked Shelley's and Jane's gardening solutions, too!

Light Frothy Gardening Mystery
If you like light, frothy and cozy mysteries, this is the book for you. I enjoy Jill Churchill's books even though I have been able to guess the murderer in each, but this does not deter me from further reading.

Jane and Shelly are best friends living next door to each other. Jane (not unlikely for a cozy mystery) has a detective boyfriend named Mel. So when a murder does happen, he is conveniently there to help her and her friend solve it.

In this book, Jane and Shelly enroll in a gardening class, but the teacher has bludgeoned and lies in a coma. A stuffy plant researcher takes over the class but instead of teaching the basics of gardening, he immediately delves into plant patents by showing off his pink marigolds.

The class itself is made up of an odd assortment of garden "lovers" who want to show off their particular gardens to the others--some of which are very good and some horrid.

Then, the substitute lecturer is found dead in his own compost pile, and Jane and Shelly are off to find who in the class did him in.

Mulch is an enjoyable and quick read with many humorous touches thrown in by the author. Plan to read Jill Churchill's books if you want to be entertained, and you won't be disappointed.