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)