Mulch: A Novel

Louise and Bill Eldridge and their teenage daughter Janie have only recently moved into their lovely suburban Washington home. With her children grown, her husband working, and no close friends in the neighborhood, Louise finds herself somewhat at loose ends until her gardening practices provide a tremendous distraction by way of a dead body.
A devoted organic gardener, Louise has been filling in the low spots in her yard with bags of grass clippings and leaves that she has collected from various homes in the area - much to the embarrassment of overly sensitive Janie. However, embarrassment is the least of their problems when body parts turn up in some of the bags.
One of their neighbors is a murderer, but which one? And whose body is it anyway? The corpse is lacking hands, feet, and head for identification purposes, and no one is missing in the immediate area; the police don't even know whom to look for. With curiosity and time to spare, Louise can't help poking around for clues - even Janie gets involved, with the help of a newfound friend.
But for a high-profile killer with everything left to lose, Louise's activities are no little threat, and may get her into even more trouble than her gardening did.

Coincidence and intuition figure prominently in the two-pronged plot of this slender, predictable first novel set in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Foreign-service wife Louise Eldridge is settling her family into their new northern Virginia home, in the same neighborhood where Peter Hoffman, a possible candidate for undersecretary of defense, lives. Louise, an organic gardener, begins to collect bags of leaves from her neighbors' curbsides to fill in a low spot in the back yard. Concurrently, Peter realizes he must jettison his mistress, another neighbor, in order to stay in the running for the government post. Louise and her family are shocked to discover parts of a severed body in some of the lawn bags. When Louise's husband agrees to vet Peter, the Eldridges throw a dinner party, at which a slightly tipsy Louise leads the smarmy Peter to suspect she connects him to the murder. Their subsequent meeting, when Louise bravely fends off Peter's attempt to kill her, will not surprise those readers who have stuck with the story.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gamely establishing still another garden after her husband, Bill, an ill-concealed State Department spook, moves her back to suburban DC, Louise Eldridge gathers two dozen bags of leaves from her Sylvan Valley neighbors' trash to use as organic mulch. Maybe a little too organic, since when she and her daughter Janie spread the contents of those plastic bags, they discover the chainsawed arms, legs, and torso of a woman the police can't identify. But we can: We know it's neighbor Peter Hoffman's too-clinging mistress Kristina Weeren, whom Peter strangled when her existence threatened his confirmation as undersecretary of Defense. Now, if only Louise could remember the telltale detail about the night she collected those leaves.... A first novel whose slender plot leaves its smart, appealing heroine all dressed up with no place to go. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.