Aunt Dimity and the Duke (Aunt Dimity Series #2) » (~)

Nancy Atherton is the author of twelve other Aunt Dimity mysteries, many of them bestsellers. The first book in the series, Aunt Dimity's Death, was voted "One of the Century's 100 Favorite Mysteries" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.

Emma Porter is forty, fat, and 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 by setting out on a summer-long driving tour of England's glorious gardens. At her first stop, Bransley Manor, she meets the Pym sisters - a delightfully eccentric pair of identical twins who are close friends and confidantes of the mysterious Aunt Dimity. The Pyms - with Aunt Dimity's help - derail Emma's tour by sending her to savor the little-known private gardens of Penford Hall. Penford Hall, a sprawling Gothic manor house set high on the cliffs of Cornwall, is awaiting a miracle. Once every hundred years - so the family legend goes - an ancient artifact known as the Lady's Lantern must light of its own accord or the Penford line will come to an ignominious end. Grayson Alexander, the fourteenth duke of Penford, fears that he may also be the last duke of Penford, for the Lady's Lantern is missing and he has mere months in which to recover it. Grayson is distracted from the search by his beautiful but vindictive cousin Ashers, a fading fashion model who suspects him of nothing less than the murder of the obnoxious rock singer Lex Rex, and by the dreadful state of Grandmother's garden, which must be restored to its former glory. Enter Emma, who accepts Grayson's invitation to stay on at Penford Hall, beguiled by the garden's forlorn beauty, smitten by a bad case of love-at-first-sight for grieving widower Derek Harris - a fellow houseguest and another of Aunt Dimity's many friends - and filled with the delicious conviction that there's more than one mystery to be solved at Penford Hall. Emma's hunch is chillingly confirmed when she finds Ashers sprawled facedown and bleeding at the bottom of the garden's uneven steps. She's barely alive - and though Emma herself has wished Ashers to vaporize at times, someone else clearly had something more permanent in mind. Emma is determin

Publishers Weekly

Atherton's second novel proves more amusing than her first (Aunt Dimity's Death) as it recycles several characters from that mystery/ghost story. Bostonian Emma Porter-a 39-year-old computer analyst and ardent gardener recently jilted by her longtime lover-is on her own in England, exploring Cornwall's gardens. A seemingly chance encounter leads her to Penford Hall, a name prominent in the tabloids five years earlier when a rock star's death peripherally involved Grayson Alexander, the 14th duke of Penford. At the Hall, Emma is greeted by Grayson as the savior of his ruined chapel garden, waiting to be restored in time for the village ``Fte'' that occurs once every 100 years to celebrate a legendary local supernatural event. That act is memorialized in a chapel window being examined by restorer Derek Harris, a widower who soon becomes Emma's romantic interest. Also present is a fading supermodel whose acerbic tongue cuts the story's high sugar level until she is rendered unconscious by a blow to the head. The source of Grayson's largesse and the identity of the model's attacker, when revealed, leave some questions unanswered, but romance runs rampant, happy endings abound and most readers will be smiling at book's end. (Nov.)