Joelle Steele

The daughter of freed slaves, Mariah Arden was born in 1879 in Louisiana and is passing for white. At age 15, she headed for Ohio where she enrolled at Oberlin College and graduated with a degree in botany. While working as a greenhouse manager for the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California, her book, "Devil's Garden: An Encyclopaedia of Toxic Plants, " was published in 1918. And now, in 1920, she finds herself involved in the investigation of multiple murders in the Monterey Bay area - and in a romance, with her best friend, Jules de Bergeron.