The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Country Gardening with Murder, Ghosts and a Very Unlikely Group of Friends!

Every so often, a cozy mystery comes along with a title that makes it almost impossible not to find out more. The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Country Gardening by Naomi Kuttner was certainly one of those books for me.

A retired assassin who is living quietly in a small New Zealand town, doing a bit of gardening, and solving murders? I was all in, and that was even before I had met Dante, Eleanor, or Charlie.

Published in January 2025, The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Country Gardening is the first book in Naomi Kuttner’s Retired Assassin’s Guide series. It was followed by The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Orchid Hunting, while a third mystery, The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Amateur Theatrics, is also on the way.

But this first book is where everything begins, and after reading it, it isn’t difficult to see why the series has found an audience.

Welcome to Te Kohe

Our very unlikely hero is Dante, a former government assassin who has moved to the small coastal town of Te Kohe in New Zealand.

Dante isn’t looking for excitement. In fact, he would very much prefer the opposite.

He wants to leave his former career behind and work out how to live something approaching a normal life – he even attends a weekly online support group, Assassins Anonymous, to help keep him in check, which tells you quite a lot about the slightly offbeat humor running through the book.

However, his attempt at retirement soon brings him into contact with Charlie, a young gardener who comes to work for him, only because he used to look after the garden for the previous homeowner, and Dante doesn’t quite know how to say no to him.

Charlie is kind, likable, and about as different from Dante as it is possible to be, and he also has one rather unusual talent. Charlie Wilson can communicate with ghosts.

It sounds as though Naomi Kuttner is throwing everything into the pot at once, yet strangely, it works really well. The paranormal side never takes over the mystery. Instead, it becomes another part of this rather odd little world.

Then there is Eleanor, who will quickly become one of your favorite characters.

A Murder Changes Everything

Dante’s hopes of keeping to himself don’t last very long. After being pulled into attending a local event, supposedly as protection for a notoriously unpopular resident, a woman is murdered, and suspicion begins to fall uncomfortably close to Charlie and Dante.

With the murder happening in front of almost everybody in the town, the duo are the only people without an alibi – so it has to be one of them, right?

Enter Eleanor. On the surface, Eleanor appears to be a well-connected local woman who knows everyone and everything happening around Te Kohe, but there is a whole lot more to her than meets the eye.

Eleanor recognizes that Charlie and Dante need someone to prove their innocence, and so the three gradually form one of the strangest detective teams I have come across in a cozy mystery.

Dante has the training and physical skills. Eleanor has the brains, social connections, and her own rather interesting set of talents. And, Charlie can talk to dead people.

Why I Thoroughly Enjoyed The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Country Gardening

A lot goes on in this book, but the pacing is superb, with no lag from start to finish.

No repetition, no waffle to pad it out, just a superb set of characters, a wonderfully relatable small town, a very clever murder, and all with laugh-out-loud humor.

That’s quite an achievement when your main character is a retired assassin whose gardener chats to ghosts!

Dante is particularly funny because he isn’t necessarily trying to be. His view of ordinary social situations has been shaped by a very unordinary career, and watching him attempt to adjust to normal life provides some of the book’s best moments.

There is also something very likable about Te Kohe itself. Kuttner lives in New Zealand and created a fictional town using elements of the country she loves. That gives the series a setting that feels a little different from the English villages and American small towns we see so often in cozy mysteries.

I also enjoyed the fact that Dante isn’t suddenly transformed into a conventional amateur detective.

His past matters, and his instincts haven’t disappeared simply because he has retired. There is always the feeling that Dante knows exactly how he could deal with a troublesome person if he weren’t trying very hard to become a better member of society.

A First Book That Makes You Want the Second

Perhaps the best compliment I can give The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Country Gardening is that by the end, I wasn’t simply interested in another mystery.

I wanted another mystery with these people, and that’s an important difference.

That continues in the second book, The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Orchid Hunting, which takes the group into another Te Kohe mystery, this time involving an orchid event.

And then we have book three, The Retired Assassin’s Guide to Amateur Theatrics, with Macbeth coming to Te Kohe and an old murder apparently refusing to stay in the past.

The individual murders need to keep me guessing, of course, but I also want to close the book feeling as though I have made some new fictional friends.

Dante, Eleanor and Charlie certainly qualify, and thankfully for us, there are more murders waiting for them.

And if you still need convincing, Goodreads currently has the book at 4.23/5 from more than 12,600 ratings. What more can I say?