Red Lily, the last in her Garden trilogy (Blue Dahlia & Black Rose), looks at three women in different phases of their lives who find love and solve an old family mystery - finally putting to rest a ghost that has been haunting Harper House for generations. This time it is Haley, the distant relative who arrives in Harper House pregnant and is taken in and given a job in the garden center. In the earlier books we saw her give birth to Lily with Roz's oldest son Harper being present. So, there is no surprise in who is going to hook up in this last book. They both feel the other is off limits and feel weird developing this relationship under the eyes and roof of Roz, but they find it is OK to love each other and as they deal with the nasty ghost, their relationshipp solidifies.
One of these times I will stop apologizing for reading this fluff, but I still think Roberts does a better job at fluff than most. Again, I learned something more about the gardening business, an important piece of this trilogy. This time it was about Harper's job propogating plants and developing hybrids. What a painstaking process! I continued to like the geneological research done on the ghost, though I thought - wouldn't it be nice to always have a ghost around to tell you what really happened. The part that really drew me to this particular book was Haley's story of how she got pregnant - in grief over the loss of her father she turned to a friend. When he went off to college she realized she was pregnant and for various reasons chose not to tell him about the pregnancy. I am glad Roberts describes this variation of single motherhood. Of course the patness of it all sometimes drives me nuts, the perfectness of the relationships - how all three couples and their kids get along so smoothly, and they all get married within a year's time. But the rest keeps me reading Roberts.
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