Betty A. Schaffer

What happened to Jacques Gaillard? The brilliant teacher at the École Nationale d’Administration, who trained some of France’s best and brightest as future prime ministers and presidents, vanished ten years ago, presumably from Paris. This ten-year-old mystery inspires a bet—one that Enzo Macleod, a biologist teaching in Toulouse, France, instead of pursuing a brilliant career in forensics back home in Scotland, can ill afford to lose.

Adam Strickland must write a scholarly monograph about the famous Docci garden in Tuscany. Dedicated to the memory of a 15th century nobleman's young wife, the garden is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills, and classical inscriptions. Adam comes to suspect that something sinister lies buried in the garden's strange iconography. What if Lord Docci's wife was murdered, and her memorial garden is filled with pointers to both the method and the motive of the crime?