Mystery & Crime, Fiction Subjects

Blue Poppy

Name: Blue Poppy
Author: Skye Kathleen Moody
ISBN: 9780312154790

by Skye Kathleen Moody

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Overview

For Fish and Wildlife Agent Venus Diamond, it's the perfect day to investigate a murder. It's foggy and raining on the Olympic Peninsula, Venus's eccentric mother is having trouble with her adopted son Timmy, and her fiance has just broken off their engagement - by E-mail, no less. What better distraction from this sudden mayhem than a crime scene? So Venus hops the department chopper up the coast from Seattle (stowing her Harley for the return trip) to the village of Fern, Washington, home to a rather snooty spa catering to Seattle's affluent, the corporate offices of the exclusive Avalon parfumerie, and an ecological preserve. In the preserve, near the meadow Avalon uses to cultivate blue poppies for their fragrance, a security guard has discovered the body of a lepidopterist. Upon investigating, Venus finds that a motley crew of suspicious characters exploit the preserve for their own selfish reasons, and any one of them could have popped the butterfly collector for witnessing something he shouldn't have. It's up to Venus to find out which one did the deed.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

A second outing for tiny Fish and Wildlife troubleshooter Venus Diamond (Rain Dance, 1996) sends her to a lovely salt-spray meadow on the outskirts of Seattle. Jilted via e-mail in chapter one, Venus throws her engagement ring into the freezer and applies her know-how to the fatal shooting of a young scientist, an interloper found just yards from the leased poppy fields of a nearby perfumery (Blue Poppy, so exclusive a scent that Venus's movie-star mom wears it) with the scales of a thought-to-be extinct butterfly (the Dungeness Silverspot) still staining his fingers. In due course, Venus meets the media-slick Avalon brothers, busy choosing next year's Miss Blue Poppy, and the Budge sisters: haute couturiere and butterfly black-marketeer Mimi and drop-dead gorgeous Lily, still recovering from her infatuation with Mimi's fiancé, the lepidopterist who did indeed drop dead. Then there's Cookie, Richard Avalon's jealous wife, and wealthy, elderly Aggie, who lives the natural life in a mountain shack (and dies an unnatural death). Before the close, two more will be dead—a temperamental model and a poisoned resort chef—and you'll meet a family of bears named Sunbeam, Berry, Roe, and Radio.

There's some terrific social and environmental lore, plus a number of eye-catching characters, but Moody never slows down for more than a superficial scan of her crowded horizon. An author with a lot of potential, but she reads like Jackie Collins on a busy day.