The Lemon Garden - Softcover

In the best romance/thriller tradition, three-time British novelist Rossiter sets strong-willed, likable English actress Joanna Fleming a fascinating dual mystery to solve: after a car accident leaves her with amnesia, she must both recover her memory and find out who is so threatened by her lost knowledge as to want to kill her. In beautifully evoked Italian countryside, Joanna fights constant doubts about all that her elderly aunt Steffy, lover Roddy Marchant and director Frank Harmer tell her about her identity. She is especially suspicious of Steffy's intense, handsome and cynical stepson, journalist Angelo Valente. Certain objects and places--a single stud earring, a fancy gown, her aunt's fragrant lemon garden--trigger abject terror in Joanna, leading others to wonder if she's lost her wits. After Angelo saves her from a murder attempt, Joanna finally decides to trust him, and together they investigate a possible link between Joanna's accident and the murder of a female reporter whose body is found near Steffy's home. Drawn to the lemon garden to verify her own understanding of the past, Joanna at last completes the circle of memory. A gutsy heroine and a taut, psychologically suspenseful read.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The British author of Some Pleasure There to Find (1976) turns from airy romance to sturdily plotted mystery/suspense--in an Italy-set story that keeps pace with the flights of an amnesiac actress from pursuits by assassins and her own demons. Joanna Fleming, hospitalized after an auto accident, remembers nothing about her life, her friends, her career. But, still, there's that certainty that something horrible has occurred. Gradually, Joanna will return to the circle of friends she's left-- a faithful lover, a concerned aunt-by-marriage, the aunt's irritable son, a brilliant film director, and others. But just now out of the hospital, she's tormented by a ``nameless horror'' when she holds an odd earring (was its mate worn by a corpse in the lake?), as well as when she visits her aunt's lemon garden, where words of evil come through like ``points of light in a fog.'' Chases, disguises, an apparition, two women murdered--by the end, all will lead to the lemon garden.... The first-person narration is routine female-victim blab-all, but the pace is fast and steady, and the mystery meticulously constructed. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.