Review of: Pushing Up Daisies by Rosemary Harris

Meet Paula Holliday, a transplanted media exec who trades her stilettos for garden clogs when she makes the move from the big city to the suburbs to start a gardening business. Paula can handle deer, slugs, and the occasional human pest---but she’s not prepared for the mummified body she finds while restoring the gardens at Halcyon, a local landmark.


Casual snooping turns serious when a body is impaled on a garden tool and one of Paula’s friends is arrested for the crime.


Aided by the still-hot aging rocker who owns the neighborhood greasy spoon, a wise-cracking former colleague, and a sexy Mexican laborer with a few secrets of his own, Paula digs for the truth and unearths more dirty business the town has kept buried for years.

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Pushing Up Daisies (book 1 of The Dirty Business series) is set in the fictional town of Springfield, Connecticut. Within it's pages we meet some great characters. Paula Holliday, gardener extraordinaire; Babe Chinnery, owner of the Paradise Diner; Mike O'Malley, detective on the Springfield PD.


Secrets abound! Seems like everyone in this small town as at least one dirty little secret that they are trying to keep to themselves. Paula doesn't know who to suspect, who to rule out when her friend Hugo is arrested for murder. She's certain he's innocent, but in order to convince the police, she must find out who the killer is herself. But how is she going to do that trapped in a greenhouse?

Forty minutes later, it was pitch-black, getting colder, and I was running out of options. Despite my embarrassment, I decided to call Babe at the diner, to see if she or Chloe could rescue me. Dead battery. So much for that idea. One of the unintended consequences of rarely using your cell is that it will inevitably run out of juice without your noticing. Until you need it.


I didn't trust myself to break any glass panels without bringing the whole damn house crashing down around me. Besides, despite its condition, it was exquisite, so, bone tired, I did the only other thing I could think of. Using my backpack as a pillow, I crawled onto the potting table, pulled the dusty tarp over me, and succumbed to what someone once called "the divine stupidity of sleep". {p86}

I enjoyed spending time with Paula and her friends. The mysteries between the covers of Pushing Up Daisies are well plotted. I kept changing my mind about who was guilty of what.


Title: Pushing Up Daisies

Author: Rosemary Harris {website}

ISBN:9780312943721

Pages: 320

Published by: Minotaur Books (Feb 2009)

Categories: Fiction, Mystery, Series

Source: author

Grade: B What does this grade mean?

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge

Books in this series:

Pushing Up Daisies**
The Big Dirt Nap
Dead Head
**This review.