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

Halloween As a Murder Backdrop, in Fiction and Fact

Halloween is around the corner, and murder mystery authors can't help but be drawn to this celebration of restless dead souls and dark forces in the chill, autumn night. Fictional tales using the holiday setting include the great Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, in which Hercule Poirot is called on to solve the murder of a 13-year-old girl after she boasted at a Halloween party that she once witnessed a murder. For those who prefer their mysteries a little cozier, there's Susan Wittig Albert's Witches' Bane, her second mystery featuring herb shop owner China Bayles, who must solve a Halloween murder in which her friend, a New Age expert in tarot and astrology, is a prime suspect. For a Western flavor, read Tony Hillerman's The Fallen Man. Newly retired Joe Leaphorn investigates a skeleton discovered on Halloween at one of the holiest of Navajo places and soon realizes the skeleton is that of a missing person from one of his long-unsolved cases. In reality, crime statistics do spike on Halloween. After all, the holiday involves alcohol-infused parties, opening doors to masked people, and vulnerable children approaching strangers to ask for candy--and most of that happens at night. Actual murders that have taken place on Halloween include the sensational death of Martha Moxley (which inspired numerous books and for which Kennedy family scion Michael Skakel was eventually convicted and later released on appeal). Another horror tale that inspired film and TV documentaries is the Halloween rape and torture-murder of 16-year-old Shirley Ledford, which led to the capture of a pair of serial killer ghouls known as the Tool Box Killers. Now I've never liked the holiday's excessively macabre aspects, so some real Halloween crimes that disturb me involve hanging or decapitated bodies left in plain sight and ignored for hours by passersby who assume they are just realistic "decorations." For more real-life Halloween murder mysteries, read http://listverse.com/2015/10/30/10-sinister-halloween-horror-stories-that-really-happened/