Dear Readers,
Now that Nutmeg Street: Egyptian Secrets, Book 1 in my Botanic Hill Detectives Mysteries series is launched, some of you have asked when Book 2 will come out. Books 2 and 3 are finished and awaiting publication.
The short answer about Book 2’s arrival is . . . hopefully, by the end of this year or early 2021. I won’t bore you with the long answer.
The title? Eucalyptus Street: Green Curse. If you’ve read Book 1, you might have noticed the reference to the next book at the end of the last chapter: “[The four detectives] would have been heartened to know their next daring mystery was already simmering not too far away on Eucalyptus Street.”
If you read to the end of the Acknowledgments (no one ever does), there is a teaser scene for the book: “You will be challenged by a mysterious old mansion, a seventy-year-old puzzle poem, dusty secret passages, a hidden gemstone, and a flickering light in the nearby cemetery.”
To whet your appetite, below is the entire puzzle poem.
So, get a clue–or two or three– dear Readers. Let’s see what you can figure out about Book 2’s mystery from this riddle. Use the contact form on my website, Website Contact Form, and let me know your guesses! Here is the puzzle poem (riddle). Good luck!
‘Wishful dreams of bold emerald trappings
From radiant treetop and archaic wrappings;
To find what you seek, you must dash and dart
Only to discover the ending was at the start.
Deep down below a chamber to nourish
The players’ voices, where still flourish
Wooden words helped create the magic:
Sometimes comic and sometimes tragic.
Lions’ threatening stares from their moonlit perches
Warn of danger for would-be explorers’ searches;
But once their eyes are turned down to the floor,
The way becomes clear, it reveals much more.
An artisan’s tilework leads to loftier places
Where there are myriad quarters with timeworn traces.
When the sunlight’s ray strikes the portrait at three,
Look to the jeweled hand that recommends your knee.
Treehouse gardens seen from highest window stained,
Its panes have witnessed material treasures that remain
Dazzling and fine, but now hidden, soon forgotten with time,
Perhaps to be rescued because of this rhyme.
At the end of it all, blackened roses, wicked thorns, and delusions,
So from Gray’s elegy, I ask if beauty isn’t wasted in seclusion?
Searching must continue now but at a funeral’s pace, awaiting the light
That appears however improbably, yet shining green and eternally bright.’”
Whoa! Right? Think you know what the riddle is about? Please let me know.
