Peggy Townsend’s new mystery novel finds drama and intrigue in the world of science

In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that Peggy Townsend would become a novelist. In her long career as a journalist, mostly with the Santa Cruz Sentinel, she spent roughly half her time as a cops/courts reporter and the other half as a feature writer. That exposure to both the sordid and the noble in human experience helped Townsend – who won countless national and regional awards in her career as a reporter – develop the tools she needed to become a successful novelist

The latest product of Townsend’s imagination, “The Botanist’s Assistant” (Berkley), will be released Nov. 18, when she is scheduled to discuss her new book at Bookshop Santa Cruz. The follow-up to her 2023 Alaska-set thriller “The Beautiful and The Wild,” “Botanist’s” is her fourth novel, and it leans more into the territory of a traditional mystery than her past work.

The title character in the new novel is Margaret Finch, a single middle-aged technician in a botany lab, working at fictional Roosevelt University. Margaret’s work ethic tends toward the obsessive. Her day is so regimented she often measures her daily tasks in seconds. Tall and ungainly, she is derisively called “Big Bird” by some of her department’s grad students. She is devoted to her meticulous methods in the lab, and her boss, the gifted and prominent biologist Jonathan Deaver, whose groundbreaking work led to a discovery of a compound in plants that could help fight cancer. 

Deaver is on the brink of another big discovery when Margaret finds him on the floor of his office, dead. Disconnected from any kind of healthy emotional response, Margaret swallows her shock and sorrow and directs her intensity of feelings into surveying the scene. Hyperaware of every detail, she notices a Diet Coke bottle on the floor (her boss never touched the stuff) and the absence of the professor’s favorite cocktail glass. Deaver had a genetic heart condition, so police investigators are leaning toward natural causes. Margaret’s not buying it, however. And soon she finds herself in a whirl of suspicion and deduction in an effort to figure out how her mentor and idol actually died.

“I really love scientists,” said Townsend. “My sister is a scientist and I covered a bunch of scientists [as a journalist] at UC Santa Cruz. And, I thought, yeah, the scientific method is a lot like detective work. [Scientists] make a hypothesis. They test that hypothesis. They make observations and they arrive at a conclusion.”

As its title suggests, the book also contains actual botanical science. For instance, Margaret suspects early on that what may have killed Dr. Deaver was a species of flowering plant known as Atropa belladonna, also known as “deadly nightshade.” 

Townsend said that part of her job as a writer is to make sure people learn something about the real world through their interactions with the fictional one. “I want [readers to learn that] courtesans used to put belladonna drops in their eyes so they dilate and make them look beautiful. But the trouble was that they couldn’t see anybody they were flirting with.”

Good mysteries, she said, have to be carefully reverse-engineered. “You start with a big outline, and you put in the clues and red herrings. I love the process. It’s really creative, and the journalist part of me insists that I do the research that would make it plausible. Which is great, because I love research.”

Part of that research was to describe the lab environment exactly right. “The last thing you want is for a lab tech to read this and go, ‘No, that’s not right,’” she said. “I spent a lot of time looking at videos on mass spectrometers, looking at what kind of flasks are used, how scientists clean and wash their equipment.”

Though her protagonist can’t always be relied on for healthy human emotional response, Townsend believes that Margaret exemplifies what’s admirable about people who work in the sciences. 

“They’re curious,” she said of the scientists that inspired her. “They are so dedicated to finding an answer, or figuring out how things work. They’re meticulous and super creative. And they’re fun. I really admire their stick-to-it tenaciousness, even if they get a result that doesn’t prove anything. And they’re all about building on knowledge, adding to the knowledge of the world. And I think that’s wonderful.”

Peggy Townsend will be on hand at Bookshop Santa Cruz to talk about her new book, “The Botanist’s Assistant,” on Tuesday, Nov. 18. The event begins at 7 p.m. 

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