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Thank you Random House for this gifted copy.

Y’all!! Read this synopsis! It completely hooked me and I’m diving in!

𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: the Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.

And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home’s past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.

Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate’s young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents—monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.

Could the skull belong to one of his victims?

To Raquel—a woman who knows all about colorful pasts—the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate’s archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.

Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.

But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob’s brother, Fort.

The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case—before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.

💬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫?

AOTD: Our current wind chill is -53°🥶

Yesterday

The roads were still pure ice, so I wasn’t able to make it all the way into Minot, but I was able to stop in one of the closer small towns that had a grocery store and get a few groceries. Thankfully, they had one gallon of skim milk left so that should get us through a few more days. And I’m also thankful that we have quite a bit of meat in our freezer along with frozen veggies so I was able to pull together Skillet Creamy Cajun Chicken Lazone with Herby Corn from Half-Baked Harvest.