John Singer Sargent has fled Paris after the debacle of "Madame X", the painting that destroyed his reputation—but he begins to heal and paint again in the Cotswolds village of Broadway. There, in a Bohemian enclave of American and British artists, writers, illustrators, poets and actors, he begins to create a painting that will make him famous once again—the luminous portrait of two little girls in a garden: "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose". But all is not well in the garden, and when the mysterious death of "the blue bird" and other strange incidents occur, John calls on his old friend Violet Paget to travel down to Broadway and help solve the mystery. Violet is happy to leave London after her "tell-all" novel Miss Brown has led to her being shunned by the people she didn't think she was exposing...but she finds new friends in Broadway while the simple mystery turns into a much more complex one when a dead body is discovered in the garden. This is the fifth mystery in the John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget Mysteries series.