Imaginative Miranda wonders if keen herbalist Lizzie’s late husband, Jeffrey, really died a natural death. The trees standing above his scattered ashes are rumoured to be ailing, and now a developer wants to uproot them.
Miranda’s ditzy unorthodox ways of trying to trip her acerbic childhood friend into revealing what really may have happened to Jeffrey, seed psychological reactions that germinate unintended new rivalries – at grave risk.
Can the trees be saved without unwelcome attention to their ‘guest’; and who is really leading whom up what garden path? Something is troubling the women’s once-reliable mutual friend Freddie, whose grip on reality starts slipping. While the trio slyly mislead one another, and themselves, others – including the developer – have tangled, hidden personal agendas too. New relationships form where old hopes and mistaken assumptions are disrupted. As jealousies grow in the gaps, and bruised feelings harden, revised ambitions let deadlier intentions take root. Miranda will need all her wit and resourcefulness to field what follows.
How Husbandry got here
‘Husbandry’ originated in noticing that occasionally an answer to a crossword or codeword game in a newspaper’s puzzle page, echoed a current challenge or interest in my life. Most did not, and of course the handful that did were just life’s random coincidences…but perhaps here was the germ of a book.
What if someone either took such coincidences seriously or – even better – tried to manipulate them to steer or probe another person’s preoccupations, or anxieties?
I decided it would be fun to create a very amateur sleuth who uses this idea as an eccentric, but perhaps ‘safe’, way to test a friend’s suspected bad conscience – with unintended and deadly consequences, of course. I would keep the writing light, but let the plot steadily darken.
Trees, plants, love, (dis)loyalty, money – and diligent misleadings of each other – soon featured in the emerging terrain in which my wayward sleuth was digging so unwisely.
With the help a place on one of Jericho Writers’ twelve-month Ultimate Novel Writing Courses, I set about trying to complete a first draft within one year. (My first novel had, on and off, taken nearly a lifetime).Thanks to Jericho’s structures, tutors and my co-students, with all their invaluable feedback, my target was (just) achieved. Next came the usual further revisions, rewrites, and rounds of rigorous cuts and prunings.
When the novel’s first draft was almost complete and I was wondering what title worked best, I realised how ‘husbandry’ matched each of the characters’ underlying approaches to their growing obsessions: horticulture, romance, finance. Like the answer to one of those other puzzles where three different clue words will team with the same term, no longer random – but serendipitous.
How I approached the story
I wanted to keep this ‘cosy crime’ story upbeat, twisty and witty; with at least one body, and plenty of darker issues rising in the mix. Easy reading, with bite.
My core characters, an acerbic trio of mid-life friends soon after a moment of change, are variously either overconfident about their aims and ambitions, unrealistic in their romantic hopes, and/or uneasy about past actions.
Their human flaws make each of them easily susceptible to a chain reaction of mistaken assumptions and decisions that will send some down darkening garden paths, so caught up in their revised aims and motives that they start to lose sight of reality – and perhaps, of human morality.
As new relationships and old loyalties are twisted and tested, events move from a merely-suspected ‘who dunnit’ thought, into a ‘who will do it – and to whom’ challenge.
How far would you go to salvage an unravelling friend, without losing yourself?
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