(Subdue) A Botanist's Guide to Flowers and Fatality- 3 Stars

[Hayjay315]

First of all, the cover of this book is just gorgeous! I may have taken a few moments to just admire it before diving into the book itself!

The second installment of the Saffron Everleigh Mysteries finds Saffron still at University College in London, although she has now been promoted to Researcher in the Botany Department. Along with her promotion, she is given a research project which involves assisting Dr. Michael Lee in responding to cases of people poisoned by countryside plants. Amid this project, Detective Inspector Green, from the first book, seeks her assistance as two women are murdered with a bouquet of flowers found at each crime scene. Green wonders if the flowers are significant and could lend clues to who the murderer might be. As Saffron untangles the meaning of the flowers, she discovers they were not placed there by accident and needs to go undercover to infiltrate a high society group of friends to solve the case. She enlists Dr. Lee to assist her as he has the status necessary to get into the jazz clubs and parties frequented by this group. I loved the parts of the story where Saffron and Dr. Lee are infiltrating the group and when they are bantering together!

This was one of my most highly anticipated books of 2023, and while I enjoyed it, I was not completely swept away with it like I had wanted. The pacing of this one did not work for me. I was excited the mystery would be incorporating floriography, but this aspect and all the details about the murders were provided at the beginning. I would have preferred these to have been not quite so grouped together. The middle dragged for me as Saffron and Lee conducted their investigation, and I thought the routes they pursued could have been condensed. The pace picks up again towards the end as the action intensifies, and we race to our conclusion. An epilogue sets up a third installment that I will most likely read, as I am not keen on leaving this series with such a cliffhanger!

If you are new to this series, they need to be read in order as context for some of the relationships between a few characters can only be gained from the first book. The second book also contains some significant spoilers for events that occur in the first.