Dr. Cook’s Garden takes place in a small Vermont town on the day that Jim Tennyson, a young doctor and former resident, returns to his idyllic hometown after years away at college and medical school. The residents of Greenfield Center consider it a blessed place where the good people live long, healthy lives and God seems to take only the troublemakers and the incurably ill.

The plot unfolds in the office of Dr. Leonard Cook, a mild-mannered “country doc” who has been the town’s only physician for three decades, tending the community as lovingly as he does his prize-winning garden. As Jim catches up on town history with Dr. Cook’s nurse, housekeeper and gardener, the young man becomes increasingly uneasy about his mentor, who he loves like a father, and deduces a secret that he never could have imagined – a secret that has consequences for the two of them, for their friends and for the whole town.

Written by Ira Levin, best known for novels like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives (as well as for the long-running play, Deathtrap), Dr. Cook’s Garden weaves together a psychological thriller and a small-town melodrama, but the internal twists that take it from opening curtain to curtain calls will not be revealed here.