A botanist's guide to flowers and fatality

Floriography helps uncover a killer in Khavari's appealing if uneven second Saffron Everleigh mystery (following 2022's A Botanist's Guide to Flowers and Poisons). In 1923 London, Saffron has rejected her suffocating aristocratic background to pursue her passion: botany. Shortly after she and her research partner, Michael Lee, return from treating a child poisoned by an innocent-looking white flower, a local detective inspector recruits the two to consult on a pair of murders; in each case, the dead woman received a strange bouquet. Saffron, using the Victorian-era practice of floriography, analyzes the flowers' "meanings" to help decode the murderer's intent, all while being pulled into a romantic triangle with the arrogant Michael and a moody biologist. The sexual tension between the three, though, feels as if it exists to create additional conflict rather than emerging naturally from the characters. The novel sings when Saffron is searching fields and gardens, scrutinizing plants, and studying archaic floral meanings, and Khavari also gets in some gleeful jabs at snobbish academics. Historical mystery fans will want to see where Saffron goes from here. (June)

A series of murders marked by unusual bouquets puzzle a botanist familiar with poisonous plants. Though she's already solved a murder, Saffron Everleigh is still fighting harassment and low expectations as a female researcher at University College London in the 1920s. Now she's teamed with the attractive, mischievous Dr. Michael Lee in a project to investigate accidental poisonings and identify the toxins. She's intrigued when DI Green calls upon her for help with several murder cases in which toxic bouquets have been left. Saffron has no trouble identifying the poisonous plants, and when she turns to a Victorian book about the language of flowers, she finds that the meaning of the bouquets is "a whole, alarming story." Lee's interest is piqued by the discovery that all the victims had drugs in their systems, and the two reluctantly form a sleuthing partnership for different reasons. After finding some commonalities between the victims, they seek information in a jazz club where wealthy aristocrats hang out. Saffron, who, like Lee, comes from a privileged background, uses a fake name to hide her connection to her family. As Lee begins to understand the battle Saffron wages against misogyny, he develops romantic feelings for her, putting her in a quandary when her love interest, Alexander Ashton, returns from an Amazon expedition and is horrified to find her involved in another murder investigation. Her refusal to stop places them all in mortal danger. An intriguing mystery with plenty of esoteric plant lore and a touch or two of romance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.