The Botanist

Well, what a year Mike Craven is having!  One where he has seen Washington Poe and Tilly Bradshaw make an appearance in The Cutting Season, one of the prestigious six Quick Read titles selected for 2022; Dead Ground has just been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award and longlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Book of the Year award, and he has had a new series sold to Constable here and Flatiron in the US – but more about that later!

And amidst all of this it’s time for us to publish his fifth Washington Poe adventure – and what a stonker it is!  It’s massive – in every sense of the word – and within its pages Mike gives us not one but two locked room mysteries to solve.  On the one hand we have the mystery of his friend and unconventional pathologist Estelle Doyle (‘dark, dangerous and sexy as hell’), arrested for the murder of her father, shot twice in the head – and Estelle has gun shot residue over her hands and, in a house surrounded by fresh snow, hers are the only footprints. Then, on the other hand, we have the botanist, a poisoner who is doing society a favour by killing the nation’s most reviled celebrities… and absolutely nothing can stop him as he seems to possess the ability to walk through walls.

Mike is spoiling us with two mysteries within one book; so if you feel smug you’ve resolved one, there is always another one to flummox you. Enjoy!

Krystyna Green