Remember Chappaquiddick? Laura Farans does. Vividly! And she can't stop dreaming about it over and over many years later, because she was one of the "Boiler Room Girls" who attended the infamous party on that fateful July weekend in 1969 when a young woman's life was mysteriously snuffed out-along with a prominent senator's anticipated bid for the highest office in the land! But that dreadful incident was chicken feed when compared to other, even more horrific events that continued to feed Laura's troubling and odious behavior. And that was just fine with her, by the way, because this strange and beautiful woman-impossibly infectious and seductive on the surface-was as totally noxious inside as the magnificent but treacherous flower that spawned her sinister nickname! Chances are you won't like Laura Farans very much. Few did after getting to know her. But you won't easily forget the lady, either. Unless you were one of the unfortunate lovers who couldn't resist the deadly orchid's perilous allure, and you're not around to think about her any longer! "Brilliant! Haunting! Delivers! Double-DOUBLE dare you to put it down!" ~Tim Pelfry-National Police Ledger "Scary as hell! Every guy's worst nightmare! Where can I meet this astonishing creature?" ~Erik Simpson-Chicago Loyola Review

McAlister Johnson is a lawyer with a checkered past. The dissolution of his marriage drives him to his first killing, and he hasn’t stopped since—targeting transgendered men. McAlister tries to elude the detective in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

The first in a new mystery series that has it all — a tragic puzzle, fabulous French food, and a peek into the fascinating world of wild orchids. In 1984, a young Canadian woman vanished while on a hiking holiday in the Dordogne region of France. Was Bedie Dunn the victim of an accident? Or could she have been murdered? Haunted for years by the disappearance of her twin sister, Mara Dunn has moved to France to try to answer these questions. Mara’s amateur investigations finally begin to show progress when she discovers a camera she is convinced belonged to Bedie in a second-hand store. In it is an old roll of film, whose exposures turn out to be mostly of wild terrestial orchids. Mara turns to Julian Wood, an expatriate English orchidologist, for help with the impossible: can they use two-decade-old photos of flowers to trace Bedie’s last route, and find the end of her journey? Julian is reluctant to get drawn into this seemingly hopeless quest, but the last exposure on the film is irresistible to him — an unknown species of Lady’s Slipper Orchid. If discovered, it might be the key to botanical fame — or it could be the marker to a shallow grave.

Third in the acclaimed “Death in the Dordogne” series. Winter in the Dordogne: delicious food, ruggedly beautiful scenery, unscrupulous orchid hunters, illegal drugs, a poetic house-breaker, and three mysterious deaths and counting . . . Expat Montrealer Mara Dunn and orchid-loving Brit Julian Wood are living together in an uneasy, on-and-off way. When bad things start to happen to their friends–first Amélie Gaillard falls mysteriously to her death, leaving behind a husband with Parkinson’s who is visited by a murderous apparition, then a local Turkish couple’s son disappears and is soon found dead of an overdose–each has a very different way of helping out. So different that each begins to wonder if they are really meant to be together. But when Julian, with his unerring understanding of the orchid-lover’s mind, thinks he has found the link between the local spike in drug traffic and murder, one of them might lose the other–permanently.

The node is a world within our world, camouflaged by stationary storms that erupt periodically around the globe. Each time the node has appeared through the eons, it has swallowed pieces of the ecosystem at that particular time in history. Everything within the node has existed separately from our world, and those things it has added have all evolved to survive . . . plants, animals, even humans. A beautiful, but emotionally damaged, tough-talking young woman, Natalie West, embarks upon an archaeological expedition with her parents’ old exploratory team—the only incentive strong enough to entice Natalie from her self-imposed isolation. The mission, on the surface, is a noble quest to find extinct, medicinal plants. But, secret and dangerous agendas threaten to destroy more than just the altruistic high hopes of the naive scientists.

Introduction: imagining orchids -- Censored origins -- The lesbian boy -- The uses of orchids -- Red book, black flower -- Utopian botany -- The signature of all things -- The name of the orchid -- Making a family -- A second Adam -- Artificial to natural -- Myths of orchids -- Orchidmania -- The blooming aristocracy -- Orchis bank -- Every trifling detail -- Beautiful contrivances -- The scramble for orchids -- Lost orchids -- Cannibal tales -- Savage orchids -- Long purples and a forked radish -- Queer flowers -- Creation and consolation -- Sexy orchids -- Boy's own orchids -- Manly orchids -- Frail orchids -- Deceptive orchids -- Orchids in orbit -- Endangered orchids -- Fragile specialists -- The spider orchids of Sussex -- Conclusion: an orchid's-eye view?