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It's been a week since I finished this book. Having finished the last page last week, I put down The Savage Garden with a great feeling of satisfaction. I'm sure most readers will too, especially those who liked The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I took up The Savage Garden having read the reviews and hoping to feel again the somewhat unhealthy thrill of an over-charged and fevered, but totally absorbing mystery rooted in a past of culture and privilege. Both books feature a mysterious garden, both feature an ancient and decayed family, and both feature a young scholar and stranger who goes to a remote locale to carry out a task to ensure the posterity of an elderly grand dame. In the case of The Savage Garden the locale is Tuscany in the present day. Publisher's Weekly of 3/5/07 summed up the plot very neatly:

"Two murders committed 400 years apart form the core of British author Mills's outstanding second novel (afterAmagansett , which won a CWA Dagger Award). In 1958, Cambridge undergraduate Adam Strickland, who's studying a curious Tuscan Renaissance garden for his art history thesis, is equally intrigued by both the garden of the Villa Docci estate and its elderly owner, Signora Francesca Docci. Built by the villa's first owner, Federico Docci, in 1577, the garden was intended as a memorial to his wife, Flora, who died when she was only 25. In the course of his research, Adam begins to sense that events, both past and present, are not as clear-cut as they appear. In particular, he discovers that there are several versions of the death of Signora Docci's oldest son, Emilio, who was shot by the villa's German occupiers at the end of WWII. Adam is hailed by all when he comes up with a novel theory explaining Flora's death in 1548, but when he begins to speculate on Emilio's demise, he finds himself in serious danger."

I enjoyed the descriptions of the Tuscan countryside, which I thought was very convincingly brought to life. The garden also is described in such detail that one really begins to feel the atmosphere of the place which so effects the main character. As in The Thirteenth Tale, there are a lot of unresolved issues from the past, people with long memories and secret and puzzling motivations. The book is not billed as a gothic tale, but in my opinion it really is. It is also somewhat of a coming of age story: the undergraduate, Adam is a sexually athletic but crass 22-year-old who grows up during his stay in Tuscany. The mistaken assumptions Adam makes about other characters sometimes seem unbelievable, and not all of his gaffes are necessary to the plot. For me this was the only false note in the book.