Book review 5: the Savage Garden by Mark Mills

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Book Summary

From the author of the acclaimed national bestseller Amagansett comes an even more remarkable novel set in the Tuscan hills: the story of two murders, four hundred years apart-and the ties that bind them together.

Adam Strickland, a somewhat aimless young scholar at Cambridge University, is called to his professor’s office one afternoon and assigned a special summer project: to write a scholarly monograph about a famous garden built in the 1500s. Dedicated to the memory of Signor Docci’s dead wife, the garden is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills, and classical inscriptions. But during his three-week sojourn at the villa, Adam comes to suspect that clues to a murder are buried in the strange iconography of the garden: the long-dead Signor Docci most likely killed his wife and filled her memorial garden with pointers as to both the method and the motive of his crime.

As the mystery of the garden unfolds, Adam finds himself drawn into a parallel intrigue. Through his evolving relationship with the lady of the house – the ailing, seventy-something Signora Docci – he finds clues to yet another possible murder, this one much more recent. The signora’s eldest son was shot by Nazi officers on the third floor of the villa, and her husband, now dead, insisted that the area be sealed and preserved forever. Like the garden, the third-floor rooms are frozen in time. Delving into his subject, Adam begins to suspect that his summer project might be a setup. Is he really just the naive student, stumbling upon clues, or is Signora Docci using him to discover for herself the true meaning of the villa’s murderous past?

I woke up this morning and it was raining. It was cold and I just felt like not getting out of my bed. I reached out for this book which I had slept on at night. I have been reading this for like… a week? This book had not really gotten a tight grip on me. Maybe because I have already read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and I kept on comparing The Savage Garden to it. Which is needless to say, unfair. It is never good to compare two things, I always say. But I just can’t help it.

I am not saying that this novel is not good. It is! In fact, I find the author’s writing very good. Mark Mills throws a healthy splotch of sex, romance, thrill and danger into an engaging narrative, mixing it with his knowledge of Italian history and art.The plot is good and unique. This is not a typical crime story wherein there is already a crime to be resolved. This is a perfectly laid out story of detection, of solving riddles and unearthing the mystery of the garden.

All in all. this is a good novel. Although it failed in its primordial task which is to amuse me, i will still recommend this to those readers who love reading mysteries.This historical mystery is enough to make you yearn more of Mills’.

Rating: 4/5

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