Reviews of Cryptologic Fiction

Kate and Alex Sheppard find their dream home in The Parsonage, a 19th-century country house in Wiltshire, with the requisite overgrown walled garden and 200 different rose bushes. The former owner, the now deceased Major Cooke, was an avid gardener with a passion for roses. While working on restoring the garden, they discover a unique blue rose, not just a washed out lavender, but a true sapphire blue. It turns out that horticulturists have been trying to create a blue rose for hundreds of years without success—until now. (Regular roses lack the gene to produce delphinidin, the pigment that makes flowers a true blue.) With the worldwide market for cut roses worth about five billion dollars annually, a true blue rose would be worth many millions to the company that could produce it in quantity. The potential value of the blue rose leads to a mad scramble to steal it. Ira Wolff, head of an American flower company on the verge of bankruptcy is desperate to get his hands on the rose. So desperate, in fact, that he sends thugs to England to threaten the Sheppards. Kenji Tanaka, a go-between for an Asian company, works with a local gang to steal the rose. The mysterious death of a friend and the murder of Major Cooke’s nephew make the blue rose a dangerous possession. The notes kept by the now deceased developer are encrypted—Major Cooke worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and kept all his journals in code (really, probably a cipher). Kate and Alex’s friend Lawrence Kingston (happily, a botanist specializing in roses), takes the journals to the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre (DISC) at Chicksands, Bedfordshire where they are decrypted, yielding the formula for hybridizing the blue rose. Wolff’s thugs kidnap Kate and threaten Alex in order to get him to sign the rights to the rose over to Wolff’s company. Tanaka’s gang steals the rose, but can’t get it out of the country fast enough before they’re discovered. In the end, the blue rose has a trick of its own that presents a novel twist at the climax.