Rating: 
Summary: Not cohesive, persuasive or interesting
Review: The romantic adventure that's promised by reading the summary of this book is not delivered within its pages. Instead, I've found a book that is too contrived and uncohesive. New ideas and characters are introduced clumsily. The author struggles to tie together a tangle of these different thoughts and characters and the reader is lost in the middle. Waiting for the story to weave together takes way too long and I began to question the investment of time I was putting into the book waiting for it to intrigue me as it had promised.
Rating: 
Summary: Not your average forensic thriller
Review: There have been a number of negative reviews of this book. This probably stems from the book being marketed as a "breathlessly paced thriller." Do not be mislead - this is not light summer reading. The author has deliberately selected a specific genre to highlight the theme of the cycle of birth, life, death, decay and rebirth. The various plots and subplots form a dense, layered narrative hinting at the complexity of this cycle. Everything from the description of garden compost overlying a hidden bonepile, the protagonist's multiple exposure photographs, decaying Indian botanical studies, misleading diary excerpts, even descriptions of the growth cycle of various trees are fragmented clues leading to further complexity and layering. Hidden within the fictional layers are insightful references to how 19th century colonial attitudes still resonate and affect the present day. Like Eco's Name of the Rose or Shield's The Fig Eater, or Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost, the genre is merely the framework for a much more multi-dimensional excursion than the average.
Rating: 
Summary: Just A Touch Disappointing
Review: This is a book that appears to start out as one thing, turns into a second and then finishes as yet another, totally different story. The result, I feel, is a rather disjointed tale that fails to live up to it's early promise. The story begins in England, spoken from the perspective of Claire Fleetwood, a forensic photographer who has just witnessed a murder. The victim was a young girl that Claire had been fond of who was a devoted gardener. At this point we are given many comparisons between gardening and the use of blood and bone, and our own mortality. We are even treated to the promise of suspense to come, thanks to Claire possibly being called as a witness in the murder case. Suddenly, the story takes a turn and Claire is invited to join an expedition through India and Tibet in search of a rare, almost mythical, green poppy. OK then, you think, the story is now an adventure and we're going to be treated to a trek through the wilds of the Himalayas. But no! We are then transported back 100 years as Claire begins a search into her family's past. During this part of the book, all momentum is lost and we seem to tread water while a background story is recounted in excruciating detail. What probably could have been told in 4 or 5 pages takes well over 100 and added little to the main plot. I found this to be a book that I really had to work hard over. The reveals toward the end were implied rather than stated obviously, which I found annoying. Read this for the interesting discussions and observations on human mortality rather than for an electrifying mystery.
Rating:
Summary: What's going on here?
Review: This is a somewhat interesting book that I feel lost its way somewhere along the way to the conclusion. The plot was murky, although the writing is generally excellent, and the characters finely drawn. The reader tends to lose the sense of the book, and there's many times when you have no idea where the plot is heading. I had the feeling that the author was as confused at times herself, which is what made the book so unusually odd. There are too many strands of plot lying around, and they really don't tie up neatly, or even close to neatly, at the end, which is not so much a termination as a petering-out of the storyline. You get to the point where you don't really care about the characters and what happens to them, and that's deadly in any work.
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