Back to the Garden by Laurie R King

 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. (Goodreads synopsis)

I love Laurie R King, especially the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.

This is a dual time-line. Readers follow Inspector Raquel Laing in “present day”, and as she follows the evidence, readers are transported to the 1970’s when the hippie commune lived at the Gardner Estate. This literary theme makes the pages turn faster, in my opinion, because I wanted to know more. I wanted to know more about the lives in 1970, but also what Raquel did with the information. 

I felt this was different from the Mary Russell series, because the inspector and the reader weren’t trying to find a killer. Instead, they were trying to find the victims. I enjoyed Raquel’s insights, her relationship with Al and sister Dee, but also her tangled thoughts about people at the Gardner Estate. The twist at the end, though, took me off guard, but made the novel much more intriguing. 

Overall I rate this novel 5 out of 5 stars.