“Lavender Lies” by Susan Wittig Albert

“Lavender Lies” by Susan Wittig Albert
1999, A Berkley Prime Crime Book
ISBN: 0-425-17032-2

Another favorite author, here I come! “Lavender Lies” by Susan Wittig Albert features mystery solving sleuth China Bayles who, during the day, runs an herbal shop. She is an ex-lawyer turned herbalist.

China and her fiancé, Mike McQuaid, are in the process of planning their wedding which is taking place on Sunday. Mike is the interim police chief in Pecan Springs, Texas. Things have been relatively quiet for weeks, but now a dead man turns up. A nasty man too, by the looks of things. China gets involved and finds there are all sorts of people who might have a really good motive to kill the developer Edgar Coleman.

In between trying to take care of the myriad details of planning a wedding and trying to solve this mystery before the wedding happens, you, dear reader, get to learn a bunch of facts about lavender. What is really cool too is at the end of the book there are all sorts of references and recipes that you can use.

This is my kind of book. What’s delightful is to learn the Susan Albert has written a bunch of the China Bayles books and with her husband Bill have written more along the lines of Victorian mysteries.

I love the way Susan writes. The story had my attention from the beginning and went right through to the end. I’m a writer and I can tell when a writer either gets bored or starts floundering with their story. I know because I’ve done it myself. None of that happened with “Lavender Lies”. It was rip-snorting good from one end to the other. I highly recommend this book and anything else Susan Wittig Albert has written.