In the Garden Trilogy

About the In the Garden Trilogy series

The In the Garden Trilogy centers on In the Garden, a landscaping and garden-design business outside Memphis, Tennessee, run out of the historic Harper family estate — and on the ghostly "Harper Bride," a grieving spirit who has haunted the house for a century and whose identity none of the family has ever solved. Blue Dahlia opens with widowed single mother Stella Rothchild taking a job at In the Garden and falling for Logan Kitridge, the business's gruff landscape architect, while she and the Harper family start piecing together clues about the Bride's tragic past. Black Rose turns to Rosalind Harper, the business's steely, twice-widowed owner, and her wary attraction to Logan's business partner Mitchell Carnegie, a genealogist hired to finally research the Bride's history. Red Lily closes the trilogy with Hayley Phillips, Roz's pregnant, newly arrived cousin, and her romance with Roz's adult son Harper, even as the ghost's presence in the house grows more dangerous the closer the family gets to the truth.

The mystery of who the Harper Bride was in life, and why she died, runs beneath all three courtships, tying the trilogy's romance plots to a decades-old tragedy that only fully comes to light — and is finally laid to rest — in the last book.

How to read this series

Read in publication order — Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, Red Lily — since the mystery of the Harper Bride's identity is pieced together gradually across all three books and only resolves in Red Lily. Each novel follows a different woman connected to the In the Garden nursery business and the Harper family estate, and the ghost story's escalating danger is part of the throughline connecting them, so this one rewards reading start to finish rather than picking a favorite heroine's book alone.