Join Mystery Gardeners in Rooting Out Evil

Spring blossoms perfume the air, and the garden centers are crowded. Luckily, if you're a mystery lover with a passion for gardening, the shelves are full of fiction to satisfy both interests! Sleuthing gardeners, or gardening sleuths, can find a kindred spirit in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, a food-loving armchair detective who is also an ardent cultivator of orchids; if you're new to the series, begin with the seminal first entry, Fer-de-Lance. Or learn some herbalist arts from award-winning Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael, a 12th century English monk with a keen eye for poisonous human and plant secrets (A Morbid Taste for Bones is a good starting point). The English are noted for their gardens and their mysteries, so retired botany professors with detective skills seem to abound. That includes Anthony Eglin's English Garden mysteries featuring retired botany professor Lawrence Kingston (The Alcatraz Rose is an International Book Awards winner); award-winning author E.X. (Elizabeth) Ferrars' Andrew Basnett, another retired botany prof; and John Sherwood's Horticultural series with Celia Grant, a London botanist. Back in the U.S.A., gardening mysteries bloom in the cozy category, including Washington, D.C., gardener and housewife Louise Eldridge, who digs up crime in the Ann Ripley series that debuted with Mulch. Meanwhile, Susan Wittig Albert offers China Bayles, an herbalist and former attorney in Pecan Springs, Texas; the series debut, Thyme of Death, was a finalist for Agatha and Anthony awards. A unique choice is Naomi Hirahara's sleuth Mas Arai, a Hiroshima survivor and Los Angeles gardener. Snakeskin Shamisen won an Edgar Award and was an Anthony Award finalist. For more gardening-themed mysteries, see http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/JobCats/HerbsGardens.html

Twins Focus the Nature vs. Nurture Mystery

Can "bad genes" destine people to violence and criminality? As a mystery fan, I've never liked that kind of characterization because I want to unravel not only the puzzle of who-done-it but also the why. A genetically predetermined monster just isn't as interesting in terms of motive and plotting. Plus, the "bad genes" theory tends to drift into offensive racial, ethnic and social stereotypes. And, finally, I prefer mystery solutions that deliver justice, and that means supposing free will rather than genetic determinism. Last year, a Boston Globe article by two associate professors of criminal justice approached the controversy head-on, arguing that a genetic basis for crime has not been adequately explored both because scientists do not have the practical or ethical ability to perform randomized controlled trials and because political headwinds cause them to avoid the issue. In the meantime, the best crime-relevant data untangling heritable personality traits (such as aggression) from environmental factors (such as bad parenting) come from identical twin studies. Overall, research finds about 50% of personality traits are heritable and 50% due to environmental factors--so no simple behavior answers from the twins. Perhaps the mystery of genetics-vs.-environment is why twins are an old theme in literature, often using a good one vs. evil one trope. For the curious, here's some mystery fiction with a twin twist: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, where the gothic history of a mysterious family includes the deeply bonded identical twins Adeline (the violent one) and Emmeline (the calm one); John Hart's The Last Child about a 13-year-old boy who embarks on a dangerous quest for his missing twin sister, with help and hindrance from a local detective; The Nightspinners by Lucretia Grindle, in which a teenage girl with a telepathic connection to her brutally murdered twin sister faces an unknown killer; and Lives of the Twins by Rosamond Smith (aka Joyce Carol Oates), the tale of a shallow woman who takes a dangerous path by initiating affairs with identical twin brothers, one gentle and one sadistic, who are estranged by a terrible secret. For more twin-themed books, see https://www.abebooks.com/books/identical-evil-siamese-lamb-niffenegger/twins-in-literature.shtml