Customer Reviews

Poisoned Petals (A Peggy Lee Garden Mystery)

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Fiftyish Dr. Peggy Lee is coming back to life after the death of her beloved husband two years ago. Although she is still teaching at the college, her heart is with her garden shop, The Potting Shed and she has a new man in her life, Steve, a vet seven years younger than her. She wonders if she should give up teaching to work full time at the shop and as a forensic botanist consultant to the police.

While collecting endangered plants to replant in the Community Garden that is part of Feed America and led by her friend Darmus, she meets his brother Luther, who tells her he is dying of cancer. On impulse she goes to Darmus' house and smells gas; the place explodes and Darmus is declared dead. However when she looks at the corpse, she knows this is not Darmus. Luther who now heads Feed America dies a few days later. An autopsy reveals he was poisoned with the evidence pointing towards his sibling; Peggy thinks otherwise and plans to prove it.

Joyce and Jim Lavene are a fabulous team who create poignant entertaining mysteries. The investigation is cleverly plotted and potted so that readers struggle with the identity of the killer as Darmus looks guilty, but the heroine thinks otherwise; fans will wonder if she could be wrong. The support cast from her parents to her friends to her new man adds depth to a delightful botany mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Dr. Peggy Lee didn't plan on becoming involved in a murder investigation during her family's visit, in the midst of her garden shop's busy season. But her dear friend, Darmus, has died in a terrible gas fire, followed by his brother, Luther, soon after. Now the police want to know why there was a flower in Luther's pocket, and who put it there.

Steve, her reliable new boyfriend, comes to the rescue and entertains the family while Peggy searches for clues. And her father is more perceptive than the others and insists on helping. Although she would prefer to keep the investigation to herself, she's grateful he tagged along when she gets into some tight spots.

Things are not always what they seem, as Peggy finds out from her mysterious internet friend. And her relationship with Steve is about to change in ways she never expected.

Peggy Lee is a middle-aged widow with a lot of spunk, who gets herself into situations no average woman would attempt. While her character is very well developed, this reviewer would have enjoyed getting to know several of the secondary characters a bit better, also.

Poisoned Petals blends a love of gardening with a well plotted murder mystery. It's an enjoyable and cozy read, perfectly suited for lounging in the garden on a summer day.

Muse Review Mark: Great Read

Reviewer: Alice Berger, Muse Reviews

In this third installment of the Peggy Lee Garden Mystery we find our main character Dr. Margaret Lee, better know as Peggy, trudging about pulling up endangered grass doing what she does best, saving our planet earth. Peggy is a teacher of botany at Queens University and runs a garden shop, but she is also the widow of a police officer and despite her best efforts, she seems to become involved again and again in solving one murder after another; often endangering her life in the process to the woe of her beloved son Paul, who himself is a police officer, and her boyfriend Steve.

However, in this story Peggy goes over the top as two brothers, and friends of hers, end-up dead, or that's the way it appears in the beginning of this tale, but is that the way it really is? What mysteries and secrets have weaved their web in the lives of these two brothers that have hiden truths even to the discerning eye of our beloved Peggy? There are just too many questions and not enough answers as far as Peggy is concerned, and she is determined to find her answers, one way or another.

Our authors bring more of Peggy's family into play in this story and I loved it. We get to meet her mother and father, an uncle and a cousin and believe me they are very colorful characters. You quickly become involved and familiar with each of them. I particularly loved Peggy's father and it was evident where Peggy inherited her thirst for finding answers. Our authors teamed up Peggy with her dad in many scenes where Peggy searched for evidence and this really brought the storyline of the mystery she had to solve and her home life together.

What can I say; this is yet another home-run for Jim and Joyce Lavene. A top-of-the-notch, over the fence mystery read with beloved characters, a fast paced storyline and a wallop of an ending. I absolutely loved this book and impatiently await another. I am happy to say that Jim and Joyce Lavene never disappoint me.

The initial premise is promising and the series was improving, book by book. This installment jumps from idea to idea, plot twist to more improbable plot twist and plods to the finish. None of the characters acts or reacts in any semblance of a normal fashion and with the introduction of each new character the focus turns to their reaction to the main character, Dr. Peggy Lee, rather than furthering the storyline. The problem is that Dr. Peggy Lee is unlikeable, the secondary characters' reactions are predictable and the lackluster plot unfolds like a Busby Berkeley musical....more friends, more suspects, more crazy reactions, more midnight chats with a mysterious on-line mentor...oh wait, let's throw in a love scene...here's the dopey cousin with sleep problems, the disapproving mother, the supportive but weary father, let's give Peggy a new job to obsess about. And on and on and on and on. The initial victim, is he a victim or a bad-guy?...isn't likeable and neither are any of the other characters.

The only reason I didn't put the book down in total disgust is that I was sitting in a hospital waiting room and had absolutely nothing else to occupy myself with for a couple of hours.

I was really looking forward to this book. But I guessed the murderer the first time he was introduced - the only character who was upset and had an axe to grind out of all the characters. I spent the rest of the book waiting to find out how long it would take peggy to figure it out. this book just not the same quality as the first 2.

The plot in this novel is contrived and yet obvious, as we can indeed pick out the murderer the first time we meet him. Our heroine, a manic drama queen with a PhD in botany, seldom eats or sleeps. She rides a bicycle through city traffic to save the environment, drives an electric truck when she needs to, and runs a garden shop and landscaping business while teaching at the university, dealing with family issues, running a 25 room house with a lab in her basement, and solving mysteries which the police cannot do. Oh, and I forgot the Great Dane who can't be trained. In fact, her energy level is fantastic; it must be the peach tea she drinks.

But my main concern here is that this novel, along with the others, so blatantly states that this flower means that, etc. etc. as if there were just one completely agreed upon language of flowers. Since the publication of Charlotte de Latour's Le Langue des Fleurs in Paris, December 1819, the great popularity of this book inspired many other journalists, lady poets, and such to make up their own lists of meanings. There is no one language of flowers, but many, as many as there are people to make them up. She assigns the meaning sorrow to the purple hyacinth found to be the agent of murder. The most traditional meaning of hyacinth in the 19th century is game, or play. On pages 86-87 she "reads" the meanings of the flowers surrounding a coffin. I have heard of none of these meanings. Daisy traditionally means innocence, and the traditional flower representing hatred is basil. By traditional, I mean those found in the most important Language of Flower books in the nineteenth century, when it was a popular fad. While the gardening details in these books are sketchy and a bit suspect, this botanist's use of the language of flowers is downright absurd. Most scientists I know do not even deign to know about the language of flowers, let alone believe in "it." But then, as I understand the experiemnts she is doing in her basement lab in the first book, she is planning to breed a night-blooming rose (roses do bloom at night, don't they) using a night-blooming waterlily. Or maybe I missed something, not being a scientist. My specialty is the language of flowers, Google me and see. The next time you read that this flower means something, ask what the source of the information is. In other words, which of the many books, traditional or modern, is the authority.