Spanning the ballrooms of Pasadena and the sunlit gardens of Altadena, a new novel of love and sacrifice from the internationally bestselling author of The Light Over London and The Last Garden in England.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Queen of Roses by Julia Kelly, which is out now.
1960: Frustrated reporter Theresa Johnson’s life changes when she receives a phone call from a Miss Pearce who claims her obituary about one of Pasadena’s last great hoteliers is wildly inaccurate. Seeking the truth, Theresa drives to the mysterious Rosewood House nestled high in the Altadena foothills. Even more intriguing than the house’s beautiful garden is Miss Pearce’s proposal that Theresa help her settle old scores by writing her biography.
1903: Beautiful but haughty, Adele Pearce is reluctant to leave the London Season and her last hope of a proposal. When she arrives in California, she discovers the startling truth of why her mother has called her there: her father has squandered his fortune and Adele must marry a wealthy American to save the family.
Stifled by expectation as Pasadena’s newest doyenne, Adele’s only comfort is Rosewood House and the beautiful garden she creates with the help of taciturn gardener Alexander Macalister. However, as Adele’s feelings for Alex flourish, a fire ignites in the San Gabriel Mountains above Rosewood House, threatening everything Adele holds dear, while in 1960, Miss Pearce learns that history has a terrible habit of repeating itself.
EXCERPT
Chapter one
THERESA
May 1960
Theresa glared at the metal fan on her desk as she banged out the last words of her article on her Olympia typewriter. The damn thing wasn’t doing a thing in this heat.
She whipped the paper out of the platen and stood, straightening the hem of her skirt before walking on low heels over to her editor Phil’s desk.
“Here’s the Goldberg obit,” she said.
Phil didn’t even bother to look up from the article he was correcting in red pencil. “Funeral?”
“Happened three days ago. He was Jewish. They bury the body as soon as possible after death,” she explained.
“Then there’s no rush.”
“The family’s expecting it to be published soon.”
“Shouldn’t have made any promises, Johnson. You know how it is. Obits get killed all the time.”
The irony of killing a piece that was meant to celebrate the life of the dead was not lost on Theresa.
“I didn’t make any promises,” she said, “but it’s a good piece.”
“Put it in the tray,” said Phil, as he slashed through a paragraph.
“Could you at least let me know if it has any chance of running this weekend? News is always slow on holiday weekends.”
Instead of responding, Phil pointed to the metal basket on the edge of his desk with the end of his pencil.
Theresa’s eyes narrowed, but she dropped the paper on top of all the other articles languishing as they waited for edits. Better to eventually have a byline printed than to get no byline at all.
When she didn’t leave, Phil set down his pencil with a sigh. “What is it?”
“I heard there might be a job opening up in the Metro section.”
The editor took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Damned reporters. Can’t keep a secret to save their lives. Yes, Roy’s leaving for the Santa Barbara job.”
It would be a huge step forward for Roy Royle. After more than twenty years of reporting, he’d been handpicked by the owner of the Pasadena Herald Times to become Metro editor of the business’s new Santa Barbara paper. It also meant that there would soon be a rare staff job open in the ranks of the Herald Times’s Metro section.
“I’d like to be considered,” she said.
“Roy hasn’t even packed up his desk yet and already you vultures are circling,” said Phil.
Theresa kept her lips firmly shut. She’d learned during her tenure at the Herald Times that sometimes it was better not to say anything than to argue a point.
“You really think you’re ready for Metro?” asked Phil, his skepticism clear.
“I do,” she said. “I’ve been working in Obits for two years, and I fill in on weekends—”
“Only in rare circumstances,” Phil reminded her.
“Nevertheless, I think I’ve more than proven I can do the job.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Phil before adding, “but it won’t just be my decision. Gareth will have final say.”
“I understand,” she said. Winning over managing editor Gareth Packard
would be a tall order, but after two years of keeping her head down and producing good, consistent work in Obits, surely he’d have to consider her.
“Now go. I have a job to do and so do you,” said Phil.
Theresa turned on her heel and walked back up the length of the newsroom, holding her breath as she passed through the cloud of cigarette smoke that always hung around Archer Madison, the way dirt followed Pigpen around in the Charlie Brown comics.
“Still languishing in the land of the dead?” asked Archer, the paper’s most ambitious young reporter, with a smirk.
She shot him a sweet smile. “Still a pompous ass?”
That sent Archer laughing, which made him cough, which made him hack. And hack. And hack.
Theresa couldn’t bring herself to sympathize with the bastard. The first day she’d arrived at the paper fresh from the Columbia Journalism School in New York City, Archer had taken one look at her and asked, “Lady reporter?
What are you working? Weddings or Society?”
“Obituaries,” she’d ground out.
“Just as bad,” he’d said before treating Theresa to her first show of his laugh/cough/hack triple act.
She hated that what Archer had said that day was true. Most women reporters were stuck in the doldrums of newspapers across the country. A few had risen through the ranks thanks to hard work, good luck, and general mercilessness to write major stories on crime and politics, but Mr. Packard had made it very clear during Theresa’s interview that the most she could probably hope for at the Pasadena Herald Times was one day covering the education beat.
Back at her desk, Theresa began shuffling through her notes for a faded nearly famous jazz singer’s obituary that was due at the end of the day. Mercifully, the tan telephone on the corner of her desk rang, giving her an excuse to put off figuring out a more delicate way to phrase the singer’s onetime manager’s suggestion that taking cocaine to work and laudanum to sleep in the twenties had probably contributed to the life of general ill health that had ultimately led to the singer’s demise.
“Theresa Johnson,” she said into the phone.
“Miss Johnson? There’s a telephone call for you,” said one of the paper’s
switchboard operators.
“Who is it?”
“A woman who says there’s an error in one of today’s obituaries.”
Theresa sighed. “All right, put her through.”
She waited a moment for the operator to connect the outside call and then said, “Theresa Johnson speaking.”
“Miss Johnson? Thank you for taking my call. My name is Adele Pearce. I am concerned about the accuracy of one of your articles that ran in this morning’s paper.”
The woman’s voice sounded strong, but it had the timbre of age and, if Theresa wasn’t mistaken, an English accent lacing through most of her words.
She clamped the receiver between her ear and shoulder so she could grab a reporter’s pad off the stack on her desk and a pencil. “May I ask which article it was?”
“The obituary for Guy Whitley.”
She remembered writing the piece. Former hotelier. Grew up in Chicago and moved to California to make his fortune just before the turn of the century. Fell on hard times before the First World War and seemed to have lived a fairly quiet life afterward. He had one child, a son who had died in Italy during the Second World War, and a wife who had passed away from cancer in 1949. He’d moved into a care home for about five years before dying of natural causes. Phil had given her two hundred words, no space for a photo, and had made her wait weeks for it to run.
“I remember the piece. What is the error you wish to have corrected?” she asked, tapping her pencil against her notepad.
“All of it. The entire article is wrong.”
Theresa’s pencil froze in midair. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Pearce, but—”
“Miss Pearce,” the older woman interrupted.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Pearce, but I can assure you that I researched Mr. Whitley’s life very carefully.”
“Apparently not carefully enough,” the woman said, her tone wry.
“May I ask how you can be certain?” she asked.
“Well, first of all, you said that his wife died in 1949.”
She let out a breath. If the date of Mrs. Whitley’s death was incorrect, it should be a relatively easy correction to issue.
“All right. Do you know when Mrs. Whitley died?” she asked.
“In 1949, as you wrote,” said Miss Pearce.
Theresa frowned. “Then there is no correction needed.”
“Yes, my dear, there is. You see, she was only the second Mrs. Whitley.”
Excerpted from THE QUEEN OF ROSES by Julia Kelly. Copyright © 2026 by Julia Kelly. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LCC.
