Carmen's Roses: A Story of Mystery, Romance and the Paranormal

Iris is flying to New Zealand to do two things: recover from a serious illness, and make peace with a woman she wronged twenty years ago. She is not expecting Storm to be dead before she even arrives.Storm's body is found beneath a rose bush in the garden of a wooden villa in Devonport, Auckland. The police call it an accident. Iris is not so sure. Neither is the mysterious blue and yellow ceramic jar that Storm treasured, which someone seems very determined to get their hands on.Still weak from chemotherapy, struggling with the shadow of an old love affair and the onset of troubling new symptoms, Iris finds herself drawn deeper into the tangle of Storm's last weeks, the secret romance, the dangerous doctor, the woman called Myra who watches too carefully and wants something Iris cannot quite name.Around her, Auckland shimmers in the summer heat: the rose-clad villas of Devonport, Cheltenham beach at low tide, the volcanic cone of North Head, the ferry to the city. And threading through it all, the quiet guidance of Tom the energy healer, the unexpected warmth of Georgina and her grandson Francis, and the slowly dawning sense that Storm's spirit may not be entirely finished with Iris yet.Warm, atmospheric, and quietly gripping, Carmen's Roses is a story of mystery, alternative medicine, and the strange persistence of guilt, resolved finally in a crossword clue that spells out everything.The first in a trilogy of interlinked novellas, also can be read as a standalone.