The beloved Aunt Dimity returns in this delightful follow-up to the book that launched the Aunt Dimity series. Watch out for Nancy Atherton’s latest, Aunt Dimity and the King’s Ransom, coming in July 2018 from Viking!Emma Porter is forty, fat, frumpy, and a passionate amateur gardener. When her longtime lover dumps her for a younger woman, Emma escapes the cloying sympathy of family and friends … sympathy of family and friends by setting out on a summer-long driving tour of England’s glorious gardens. A Dimity-contrived coincidence brings her to Penford Hall, a sprawling Gothic mansion in Cornwall, where she finds a duke in search of a missing lantern with extraordinary powers. Suspecting there’s more than one mystery to be solved at Penford Hall, Emma accepts the duke’s invitation to stay on and restore the once glorious chapel garden to its former beauty. The dark rumors surrounding a rock star and the near-death of the duke’s beautiful cousin confirm Emma’s suspicions, and set her–with Aunt Dimity’s ghostly guidance–on the path to Penford Hall’s secrets and the pleasure of unexpected love.
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My favorite of all the cosy Aunt Dimity books is actually a prequel. Frumpy and not so young computer techie Emma is hired by the wealthy Duke to bring a neglected old garden back to life and she takes on the task with the help of two motherless children and the elderly promoter of a hot, young, obnoxious supermodel. She begins to suspect the charming Duke has murdered a wild and profane heavy metal rock star, and wonders why the nearby village is so surprisingly prosperous.