review: pushing up daisies by rosemary harris

After her divorce, Paula leaves the city to garden in a small town. She lands a position with the Historical Society to fix up the gardens at the mansion where two eccentric women lived before their deaths. As Paula explores the gardens and formulates her plan, she discovers the remains of an infant. Although it’s clear that any crime that may have occurred was long ago, Paula can’t leave the case alone and soon finds herself the target of the person who committed a terrible crime decades ago.

While it has an interesting plot, Pushing Up Daisies does suffer from having too many characters; I found myself losing track of who was who and how they were connected (it’s a small town and almost everyone is connected in multiple ways). I was also a little uneasy with how the landscape workers from Mexico were discussed; it seemed like Paula was sympathetic, but it sometimes came across as condescending. But then Paula seemed to (briefly) recognize that she had behaved inappropriately when Felix snarkily called her boss in Spanish. So perhaps the author was trying to show such tensions. I was disappointed that Felix all but disappeared after that incident. As he’s one of the potential love interests, perhaps he will show up in the next book of the series.
3/5
Review copy provided by the author.