Louise Eldridge has blossomed from a statesman's wife and party hostess in her first mystery Mulch, in which body parts turn up in the bags of grass clippings and leaves that she has collected from various homes in the area to use in her organic graden, into a PBS garden show hostess in her second mystery Death of a Garden Pest, in which she makes an enemy of a colleague who is later found murdered in the TV studio. Her third book, Death of a Political Plant, deals with the arrival of an old flame of Louise. Jay McCormick is now an investigative journalist on two distinct undercover missions--one to ensure that his ex-wife doesn't cheat on the rules for custody of their young daughter. The second one, he raises an impenetrable thicket of secrecy that results in a murder. The Garden Tour Affair, her fourth book, Louise takes her popular television show on location to film a garden tour at the historic Litchfield Falls Inn. It's a weekend in the country that promises rest and relaxation until the uneasy group of assembled guests begin to meet with the most unfortunate of accidents.
Written by Ann Ripley, each book in the series contains ten gardening essays. The essays are as much fun to read as the mystery story itself. Her latest book is The Perennial Killer. On location in Colorado for her syndicated television show, Gardening with Nature, filming alpine butterflies and avalanche lilies, Louise can see why this beautiful terrain is as precious as gold. Then the discovery of elderly rancher Jimmy Porter's body, shot to death and draped like a coyote carcass over his own backyard fence leads Louise to a staggering list of suspects. Jimmy's plan to sell his 13,000-acre ranch to a government preservation program left a lot of family, friends, and competitors with much to lose.
Rebecca Rothenberg (1948-1998) wrote three botanical mysteries featuring Claire Sharples, an M.I.T. microbiologist that has just arrived in California's San Joaquin Valley to take up an agricultural research job. The first book, The Bulrush Murders, Claire investigates the circumstances surrounding the strange death of a young Mexican friend who drunkenly plunges his motorcycle into the reservoir. This book was nominated for both Agatha and Anthony awards. In her second adventure, The Dandelion Murders, Claire stumbles upon a body in a local drainage ditch. A yellow dandelion-like flower is found on the body but it doesn't grow in the citrus groves and vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley. It belongs in the High Sierras. In her third mystery, The Shy Tulip Murders, Claire tries to help an environmentalist group to save a mountain forest from loggers by verifying the "shy tulip" in the timber stand. Instead, she locates a dead body. Ms. Rothenberg left an unfinished fourth mystery. The Tumbleweed Murders will be released in September 2001, completed by Taffy Cannon. Taffy Cannon is the author of Guns and Roses, nominated for an Agatha Best Novel award this year.
