Book Tag: 10 Books with Flowers on the Cover. Let’s Welcome Spring!

Hello, readers, and happy spring to all of you. While it is still cold (but not snowy!), it is technically springtime, and for many of you, the first blooms have started peeking out of the ground. I thought I would celebrate the change in seasons with 10 books with flowers on the cover. I found quite an assortment of beautiful and deadly flowerson my shelves.

I also realized that quite a few authors, such as Frances Crane, Agatha Christie, Carolyn Keen, and Rex Stout, frequently utilize flowers to illustrate themes or character traits in their books. (I could do a whole post on the poisonous plants that adorn her book covers and might in the future.)

Enjoy this deadly bouquet of flowers, and maybe you’ll find a few books to put on your spring TBR.

Flower type: White Tulip.

Flower meaning: Forgiveness, respect, purity, and honor.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Jack Ivers, an urban sophisticate with a particular fondness for wealthy women, lies peacefully in his bed, dead. This scenario is greatly convenient for the woman who finds him, as she was on the scene to kill him herself. More curious, the thirteen red tulips she noticed entering Ivers’ home had been replaced by thirteen white tulips before she made her exit.

A number of people had good reason to want Jack Ivers dead, and naturally it falls to Jean and Pat Abbott to solve the confounding case.

Flower name: Daffodil.

Flower meaning: Rebirth, new beginnings, hope, joy, and good luck.

Goodreads synopsis:

PI Pat Abbott and his wife, Jean, are vacationing in Kentucky horse country and visiting Pat’s old friend Rob Murray, who lives there with his sister and daughter. But when Rob’s trainer is found dead, Pat is willing to bet it’s murder despite the local doctor’s verdict of suicide. The quest to find the truth will involve a fainting blonde at the Abbotts’ hotel and some of the more colorful citizens of Lexington in this suspenseful Golden Age classic featuring “one of the more interesting married teams of detectives” (Thrilling Detective).

Flower type: Queen of the Night Cactus

Flower meaning: Victory. Symbolizes transition shrouded in mystery and intrigue.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Retired florist Theo Bloomer goes to Israel to rescue his niece from terrorists in this engrossing mystery. On the shores of the Dead Sea, Dorrie Caldicott is coming into bloom. A spoiled graduate of the finest prep schools on the Atlantic Seaboard, she went AWOL during a tour of Israel and put down roots in a kibbutz. Her mother simply won’t stand for this kind of behavior, and it falls to Dorrie’s uncle Theo Bloomer, a retired florist who’s as meek as a daffodil, to bring the girl home. But in the sands of Israel, this gentle flower will be forced to take root or die. Theo has hardly arrived at the settlement when a pair of murders makes it unlikely he and his niece will ever make it home. Under threat by terrorists, the police, and the attentions of a few dozen intellectual farmers, Theo and Dorrie must find the killers if they wish to escape the Holy Land alive. Anyone who has envied Nero Wolfe’s orchid collection will find himself right at home with Theo Bloomer, a globetrotting florist who—like Rex Stout’s most famous detective—would prefer to be at home with his plants. Readers won’t want to miss joining Theo in this unique series by Joan Hess, one of the funniest mystery novelists on the planet. The Night-Blooming Cereus is the 1st book in the Theo Bloomer Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Flower type: Daisy.

Flower meaning: Innocence, purity, and true love.

Goodreads Synopsis:

To rescue a lost flower child, Miss Withers must learn to think like a hippie

During a six-week college break, Lenore Gregory does what all the young girls are doing in the winter of 1969: She heads to Greenwich Village to protest the Vietnam War, painting flowers on her Volkswagen. And just as she’s starting to fit in, she disappears, becoming yet another missing hippie — and a problem for Detective Oscar Piper of the New York Police Department.

Lenore’s last known whereabouts are New Mexico, on the road to Los Angeles, and there is only one person in California whom Piper trusts with the case. To find the missing girl, retired sleuth Hildegarde Withers is willing to go to the edge of consciousness and beyond. She has plenty of experience dealing with middle school children—can a flower child be any different?

Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene is part of the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries series, which also includes The Penguin Pool Murder and Murder on the Blackboard.

Flower type: Black Rose.

Flower meaning: Endings and new beginnings. A sophisticated life. Mourning and mystery.

Goodreads Synopsis:

The amateur theater company of Wrightsville is dying a slow and painful death. Every production is worse than the last, and the backers are about to pull the plug when the director reaches for his ace in the the always-reliable production TheDeath of Don Juan. For the lead, he digs up faded Broadway star Foster Benedict, whose name is enough to sell out the run. But on opening night, Benedict makes a hash of the first act, and doesn’t show up for the second. When he’s found in his dressing room with a knife buried in his back, it’s clear that the libertine’s death has come a bit too soon. World-famous detective Ellery Queen is in the audience, and in this novella—as well as in the other stories collected in Queens Full—he proves that Don Juan doesn’t have a monopoly on adventure.

Flower type: Cherry Blossoms.

Flower meaning: death, beauty, and violence.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he’s planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.

At the crime scene, Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka’s best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi. Years ago when they were both teachers, they were colleagues at the same public school. Kaga went on to join the police force while Nonoguchi eventually left to become a full-time writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka.

As Kaga investigates, he eventually uncovers evidence that indicates that the two writers’ relationship was very different that they claimed, that they were anything but best friends. But the question before Kaga isn’t necessarily who, or how, but why. In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the killer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. And if Kaga isn’t able to uncover and prove why the murder was committed, then the truth may never come out.

Malice is one of the bestselling—the most acclaimed—novels in Keigo Higashino’s series featuring police detective Kyoichiro Kaga, one of the most popular creations of the bestselling novelist in Asia.

Flower type: Red Rose.

Flower meaning: Passion and love.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Elinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are the model English couple, perfect companions set for a life of ease when they inherit Aunt Laura’s considerable fortune. But a poison pen letter begins a chain of events which is to end in tragedy. Convinced that Mary Gerrard, a childhood playmate of Elinor’s, is attempting to ingratiate herself with her aunt for financial gain, the pair travel to the family home to investigate. They find no evidence but Roddy falls desperately in love with the beautiful Mary, little realising that beneath Elinor’s restrained and unemotional exterior lies an almost obsessive passion for him. Elinor obeys her aunt’s deathbed wish despite her heartbreak, and gives Mary a large bequest from the estate. But when Mary is found poisoned, the evidence against Elinor is damning. It’s up to Hercule Poirot to find out if the case is as simple as it seems…

My review here.

Flower type: Pink Carnation

Flower meaning: Gratitude and never forgetting someone.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Now with a beautiful new series look, a classic mystery from the Queen of Crime in which the indomitable Miss Marple exposes a small town’s shameful secrets.

Lymstock is a town with more than its share of scandalous secrets–a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir.

But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs. Symmington, commits suicide. Her final note says “I can’t go on,” but Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict of suicide.

Soon nobody is sure of anyone–as secrets stop being shameful and start becoming deadly.

My review here.

Flower type: Purple Larkspur.

Flower meaning: A beautiful spirit, swiftness, positivity, and the strong bonds of love.

Goodreads Synopsis:

Blue bells will be singing horses! This strange message, attached to the leg of a wounded homing pigeon, involves Nancy Drew in a dangerous mission. Somewhere an elderly woman is being held prisoner in a mansion, and Nancy is determined to find and free her. Meanwhile, the young detective’s close friend, Helen, begs her to solve a second mystery. Helen’s grandparents, the Cornings, are frightened by a sinister wheel of blue fire that appears after dark in the woods outside their home at lonely Sylvan Lake. When Nancy discovers the significance of the eerie signal, she also learns that her two mysteries are connected.

Flower type: Orchid.

Flower meaning: Thoughtfulness, refinement, fertility, beauty, charm and love.

Goodreads Synopsis:

When a millionaire businessman hires Nero Wolfe to probe the background of his daughter’s boyfriend, it seems like just another case of an overprotective father. But when a powerful gangland boss “counsels” the detective to drop the matter, Wolfe receives a warning: a burst of machine-gun fire through the windows of his orchid room. Then the lawyer boyfriend turns up dead, leaving Archie the number one suspect. Throw in drugged drinks, two man-killing debutantes, and officials of a highly un-American party and Wolfe finds himself involved in a case where he must quickly solve one murder to prevent another: his own.

Introduction by William G. Tapply

“It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore.”— The New York Times Book Review

A grand master of the form, Rex Stout is one of America’s greatest mystery writers, and his literary creation Nero Wolfe is one of the greatest fictional detectives of all time. Together, Stout and Wolfe have entertained—and puzzled—millions of mystery fans around the world. Now, with his perambulatory man-about-town, Archie Goodwin, the arrogant, gourmandizing, sedentary sleuth is back in the original seventy-three cases of crime and detection written by the inimitable master himself, Rex Stout.