(Goodreads Description)
1920s London isn’t the ideal place for a brilliant woman with lofty ambitions. But research assistant Saffron Everleigh is determined to beat the odds in a male-dominated field at the University College of London. Saffron embarks on her first research study alongside the insufferably charming Dr. Michael Lee, traveling the countryside with him in response to reports of poisonings. But when Detective Inspector Green is given a case with a set of unusual clues, he asks for Saffron’s assistance.
The victims, all women, received bouquets filled with poisonous flowers. Digging deeper, Saffron discovers that the bouquets may be more than just unpleasant flowers— there may be a hidden message within them, revealed through the use of the old Victorian practice of floriography. A dire message, indeed, as each woman who received the flowers has turned up dead.
Alongside Dr. Lee and her best friend, Elizabeth, Saffron trails a group of suspects through a dark jazz club, a lavish country estate, and a glittering theatre, delving deeper into a part of society she thought she’d left behind forever.
Will Saffron be able to catch the killer before they send their next bouquet, or will she find herself with fatal flowers of her own in Kate Khavari’s second intoxicating installment.
I read the first book in this series and I enjoyed it, so I was expecting more of the same.
It was not to be.
The premise was actually intriguing: Inspector Green turns to Saffron because of a puzzling series of murders that don’t seem to have anything in common except that the victims were all women. All of them received very peculiar bouquets of flowers before they were killed.
Saffron discovers that not only most of the flowers in the bouquets were potentially poisonous, but that, according to the Victorian code of flowers, they also carried a message.
If this is not intriguing, I don’t know what is.
Pity that, in the end, the bouquets had very little to do with the plot, which turned out to be mostly about Saffron’s involvement with her new colleague, doctor Michael Lee, which complicates her feelings for Alexander Ashton, who’s away for most of the novel.
She gets involved with the social group of one of the victims and a lot of time is spent in activities that didn’t seem to go anywhere.
I became quite frustrated.
Also, I kept wondering why Saffron should jeopardise her – admittedly precarious – position at the university by involving herself in all these shady activities. The book tried to give answers to this, but I didn’t find them convincing.
Things wrapped in a very unsatisfying way in the last part of the story.
On the one end, Alexander reappears, and the romance thread becomes absolutely unrealistic – well, at least for me. Saffron is turned between the two men, and I’m really not sure why. The entire thread rests on untold emotions that one should really want to make clear with a person they care for, not to mention chance events that happened too conveniently to disrupt situations in ways that don’t seem realistic at all. And talking about this, who speaks the way these people speak to each other?
I’m sorry, but I truly hated this part, and I was tempted to drop the novel. I didn’t only because I wanted to know who was the culprit.
I was starting to suspect, at that point, despite the clumsy way the author was trying to disguise it.
The revelation of the mystery was very amateurish, I’m sorry to say.
The action was forced and questionable. Clear attempts were made to build tension where I (as a reader) had already worked out things I was not supposed to (or the tension would not have existed).
It was very uncomfortable.
So, yeah, such a pity. But I have to say I read an ARC, so it’s possible that the final story is more polished than what I’ve read.
I really hope so because the series’ concept is very nice and unique.
A Botanist’s Guide to Flowers and Fatality
An Excerpt
She paused outside the door, biting her lip. She was being utterly juvenile.
The moment she stepped into the room, she saw that Lee was reading a file at the desk, shining oxfords propped on the corner, his spectacles low on his nose. At the sound of the door opening, he looked up, and his lips tilted into a smirk as he slowly slipped his glasses from his nose. He touched one of the hooks to his bottom lip, like some particularly seductive illustration out of La Moda Maschile.
He stared at her for a full five seconds before saying, “Everleigh, did you really put off coming inside just because we necked a bit last night? I could see your shadow in the window pane, you know?”
And just like that, any flutter of expectation fled, and she was left with the indignation he so often ignited within her. “Are you ready to go see Mrs. Caywood or not?”
“Everleigh, there’s no need to be embarrassed. I’m certainly not,” he crooned, teeth nibbling on the hook of his eyeglasses. “We’ll just talk it through in excruciating detail. Everything’s joke, old thing.”
A Botanist's Guide to… by Kate Khavari (two #bookreview) – The Saffron Everleigh series centres around Saffron, a female university botanist in 1920s London who has a knack for detective investigation #cosymystery #historicalfiction Share on X
(Goodreads Synopsis)
Brilliant botanist Saffron Everleigh is ready for her next thrilling adventure in the newest installment of Kate Khavari’s mesmerizing historical mystery series.“A cleverly plotted puzzle” (Ashley Weaver) in the vein of Opium and Absinthe, this is perfect for fans of Rhys Bowen and Sujata Massey.
London, 1923.
Returning from Paris, botanical researcher Saffron Everleigh finds that her former love interest Alexander Ashton’s brother, Adrian, is being investigated for murder. A Russian scientist working for the English government has been poisoned, and expired in Adrian’s train compartment. Alexander asks Saffron to put in a good word for Adrian with Inspector Green. Despite her unresolved feelings for Alexander, Saffron begins to unravel mysteries surrounding the dead scientist.
As if a murder case weren’t enough, her best friend Elizabeth’s war-hero brother, Nick, arrives in town and takes an immediate interest in Saffron. Saffron learns Alexander has been keeping secrets from her, including a connection to Nick, who Saffron and Elizabeth begin to suspect is more than he seems.
When another scientist is found dead, Saffron agrees to go undercover at the government laboratory. Risking her career and her safety, she learns there are many more interested parties and dangerous secrets to uncover than she’d realized. But some secrets, Saffron will find, are better left undiscovered.
As I get to the third book of the series, I’m seeing a pattern: Khavari is very good with characters. I love how she builds characters and relationships and how she’s able to make the reader care for these characters. I even like how she creates romantic situations because she’s clearly aware of the tropes but tries to use them in a more personal, more realistic way, being aware of the limitations the tropes might bring on, especially when it comes to believability. As a reader who’s not really into romance, I appreciate this.
But when it comes to the mystery, it falls flat. The mystery in this book was a mess. It started with Alexander asking Saffron to help his brother, who had been accused of murder. I was totally hooked! Not only did I not know Alexander had a brother, which gave me opportunities to learn more about him, but this is also an interesting character and relationship development because, up until now, Alexander had always urged Saffron to stay clear from murders. I enjoyed getting to know Adrian, Alexander’s brother, and I cared for his situation. Only that, quite soon, that part faded away. Adrian got cleared of the murder, and the plot moved in a different direction. A bunch of new characters enter the story, and the plot becomes complicated and, honestly, not very clear. To the point that when the treadle was revealed… I’m still not sure what happened there.
And in the end, a mysterious organisation made its appearance. I don’t know. The story set out strong, but the more it progressed, the weaker it became (at least, this is my impression). While Saffron’s personal life remains a strong subplot, the mystery this particular adventure hinges on is everything but. Which is a pity. The messy end ruined my enjoyment of the book. But this said, I still love the world of this series and the main cast, and that still makes me think that the story was good enough. I do think I’ll read the fourth in the series if I’ll have the opportunity.
Did you read this series? Would you read it?
A Botanist’s Guide to Society and Secrets
An Excerpt
“Because you’re Greek,” Saffron said cautiously.
“Because I look and sound foreign,” Adrian said. “They don’t care that I was born and raised here. They see only the darkness of my features and hear my mother’s people in my voice.” He tapped hash into a dish on the counter. “Because being foreign is itself a crime, eh?”
“I’ve never thought so.”
Adrian shrugged, but this time, the motion did not look to be casual punctuation to his thoughts, but like he was trying to shed the suspicion others held towards him.
“It would have been better,” he said somewhat sullenly, not looking at her, “If I’d done as Alex did. Force myself to speak like our father.”
Saffron said nothing, at once deeply uncomfortable to hear something so private about the Ashton brothers and breathless to learn more.
Adrian obliged her silent wish. “He watched our mother being treated poorly and listened to our cousins complain abotu prejudices. Even as a very young boy, he never let our mother’s voice take root like I did. It didn’t matter, though, he was kicked out of dance halls and pubs same as the rest of us, when we went out all together and spoke our mother tongue.”
He leaned slightly forward on the table. “We came back broken, you know? People, they don’t understand how it is to be stuck.” He tapped the side of his head. It occurred to her then that Adrian was perhaps not entirely sober, for his dark eyes were hazy. “Makes it hard to tell what’s in your head and what’s real. The street becomes a sky full of bullets. A fellow sweeping the street looks like he’s holding a bayonet. God knows it can be frightening, dangerous.”
Usually, soldiers did themselves harm rather than others. Saffron’s uncle, her cousin John’s father, jad, killed himself not long after returning from his deployment. She’d never considered that he might have done other members of the household harm too, but that had been a bone-chilling possibility.
“Alex, he knows this. He knows what people see when they look at him, what they think abotu those with the shock. He wants to be seen as strong, smart, in control.” Adrian chuckled. “Oh, the control! It is something he had never cared for before, and now he needs it badly. So he stepped away from it, from the family. Removed one strike against him by hiding in our father’s name, his manners.” He seemed to recollect his cigarette, now heavy with ash, and took a long drag. “But we all hide, do we not, eh?”
Saffron cleared her throat, wishing she could open a window and clear out the air too. Adrian was delving into very private matters.
THE SERIES SO FAR
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