...Tra-la... Have nothing to do with the case. Mikado - WS Gilbert Laburnam Walk Photo of Temple Newsam House, courtesy of TripAdvisor I usually bedeck my books with flowers, both wild and cultivated. More often than not, they do indeed have nothing to do with the case. They’re part of the setting, marking the seasons, differentiating between town and country gardens, hedgerows, meadows, moors, and woods. Sometimes, though, they have other purposes. In Heirs of the Body , the 21st Daisy Dalrymple mystery (just reissued by Minotaur in trade paperback), I use a pleached walk of laburnam to suggest the threat of poisoning. The seeds are deadly. In fact, I use the walk for a different purpose, and another plant is used later in the book to poison one of my characters. In another book, I killed a victim with oleander he himself had nurtured and cherished in his conservatory. Perhaps the most fun I’ve had with flowers was when I used them to indicate character and...

Spring came early to Western Oregon this year. Crocuses and daffodils started to bloom in February instead of March, but they’re the same old daffodils. Yet year after year, “my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.” This year, March brings me a different renewal: My very first mystery is being reissued, in trade paperback, twenty years after its first publication. Of course, even with a brand-new cover, it’s not quite as exciting as when it came out in 1994, but it’s still a thrill. It’s been “out of print” (except in Polish and Hungarian) for quite a while. I write “out of print” in quotation marks because it doesn’t mean what it used to mean, that the books are unavailable unless the reader hunts them down in used-book stores or libraries. Only an author’s most dedicated fans would make the effort to obtain every title. And if they did, it resulted in no profit to the author. Now, we have ebooks. Practically anything published today will probably be easi...