Rosalind Harper lives in the home her family has owned for centuries, with an assortment of family members, employees who are as close as family, and a ghost named Amelia, the Harper Bride. On the Harper House property, Roz also built a very successful business, a gardening center and plant nursery, following the death of her first husband.

Although her second, and now ex-husband, Bryce, is doing his vicious best to make her life miserable, Roz is very happy with her lot. To her surprise, there’s even a new man on the scene. Dr. Mitch Carnegie is an author and genealogist whom Roz has hired to investigate her ancestors, including the Harper Bride. He’s also an extremely attractive man who is clearly smitten with Roz and determined to pull her out of her solitary complacency.

Unfortunately, for some reason, this seem to provoke the Harper Bride. In the past, Amelia was a benign presence in the house, mostly appearing to sing the children to sleep. But now, her activities are becoming more threatening, even dangerous, as she seems to be warning Roz away from this relationship with Mitch.

And that’s really about it. There isn’t really a lot of plot or story here, just a frustrated ghost, an ex-husband pulling dirty tricks to try to ruin Roz’s standing and reputation with her friends and neighbors, and Roz and Mitch moving very, very, very slowly towards a relationship.

The rest of the book is filled with lengthy descriptions of various gardening activities and the business of running a nursery, and long conversations between Roz and her adoring friends and family. These conversations are mostly about what an amazingly wonderful person Roz is and how she doesn’t deserve the meanness of either Bryce or Amelia, but does deserve lots and lots of happiness (and sex) with Dr. Hottie.

Every member of Roz’s household is so sweet and perfect, I began to wonder if we were actually living in Stepford. She has a perfect, strong, mature eldest son who adores her and works with her. She has a perfect, sweet, gay pseudo-son who exists only to free Roz from the mundane chores of everyday life. He keeps a perfect house, serves the perfect food for every occasion, and babysits everyone’s kids, as well as providing sage wardrobe advice and a twenty-four hour shoulder to cry on (not that Roz ever cries on anyone’s shoulder). Her employees, two young single mothers, virtually worship the ground she walks on.

I don’t know about you, but that much saccharine makes my teeth hurt.

Roz and Mitch are perfectly intelligent, sensible people who go about having a romance in a perfectly mature manner, talking openly about everything that bothers them and understanding each other perfectly. Which was perfectly dull. Roz lets her temper loose every now and again, but it can’t really be considered a flaw because Mitch adores it.

I’m not in favor of stupid, immature characters, but a few real flaws or foibles would have made these two a lot more real and a lot more interesting. In some ways, the townspeople are the most real characters, because they actually seem human.

Don’t get me wrong. In anyone else’s hands, this book would have been a one-hearter, but because Ms. Roberts writes such smooth, engaging prose, it took me quite a long time to realize that nothing much was happening. (About halfway through the book, I started wishing that someone would light a fire under Mitch and Roz and get the romance cooking, for Pete’s sake.)

And those of you who love gardening will probably not think ‘filler’ every time we get started on the horticultural stuff.

I have read a lot of Nora Roberts. In fact, it was her “Born In” series that got me started reading romance. I enjoy her work and I admire her as a writer. I guess, with her kind of output, it was eventual that I would find something I didn’t love.

-- Judi McKee