The Savage Garden

I am woefully behind on posting about this summer's reading and so I am just jumping in with the 3rd Mark Mills book I read, The Savage Garden. Set in Tuscany, about 8 years after WWII (do you detect a certain partiality for the era by Mr. Mills??), a graduate student in art history at Cambridge is offered (ordered?) by his major professor to undertake a special summer project. He is to go to Italy for 2 weeks and research and write up the memorial garden at the Villa Docci as the basis for his thesis. Built nearly 400 years ago--30 years after the untimely death of his much younger wife--the garden is a memorial from Lord Docci, the bereaved husband. But as Adam begins to investigate the anomalies in the garden statuary and layout, he is troubled by what he finds and begins to think the death may have been murder, and the garden not so much a tribute as a series of clues. At the same time, Adam is intrigued by the current Docci family and the villa itself, which preserves the details of another tragic death. The current Signora Docci's son was shot on the third floor by occupying Nazis, just as Italy was being liberated by the allies. The entire floor of the villa was sealed off by her dead husband with strict instructions that it remain that way in perpetuity. Adam begins to feel he is being manipulated in his investigations, by the spirit of the dead nobleman's wife, and by the present day Docci family.
The characters and relationships in this book are more fully developed than in The Information Officer, the bits of history around collaborators and partisans provide political context, and the setting is evoked with careful detail. I was engaged throughout, and as surprised as Adam by the twist at the end.