With its cover showing a skull made of plants and flowers, all in scarlet, silver and black, Sarah Singleton's new novel will stand out on bookshelves, and the contents more than live up to the packaging. She has already established herself as Gothic specialist, winning the Dracula Society Children of the Night Award with her first teenage novel, CENTURY, and her inventiveness shows no sign of flagging. She makes wonderful use of her ingredients in this compelling Victorian fantasy.
After his grandmother's funeral, Thomas sees a lone violinist playing over her grave, a sighting which is immediately followed by another death. But someone has put a shadow into his mind, and it's not until four years later, when his new guardian pulls out the darkness, that he remembers what he saw. His grandmother's legacy to him is a sealed box, and the powers that go with it. Soon Thomas learns that there are seven such boxes, each leading to its own very distinctive garden; of the owners, members of the Guild of Medical Herbalists, two have now been killed, soon followed by a third. When Thomas meets the survivors, no one knows which of them can be trusted, since only someone who knows their secrets could have penetrated the gardens and commissioned the funerary violinist to play his haunting tune. Thomas himself, and Maud, the young charge of the owner of the Poison Garden, are each destined to inherit a box belonging to one of the victims, to make their mark on!
the garden it unlocks, and to become members of the Guild; but at high risk.
Sarah Singleton has both a fertile imagination and the verbal dexterity to bring her ideas vividly to life. Wonderful descriptions, skilful pacing and an inventive plot make for a novel to delight and surprise the reader.