Nipped in the Bud – The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

Flowers! Good, bad and ugly? The good is obvious, right? But what could be bad or ugly about flowers? I mean, I love everything about them, don’t you?

Paige Turner here, host of Through the Garden Gate a wildly popular gardening radio show and owner of The Garden Gate a quaint nursery and landscape design company. You may think with my job I have to love flowers, but actually, I chose my profession because of my love for gardening.

I love everything about it. Like -

• The feel of dirt between my fingers.
• The joy of seeing a plant bloom or a vegetable grow for the first time.
• The smell of the soil after it rains.
• The time spent in the sunshine contemplating my life and the amazing miracle of life in general.
• The slimy slugs – okay, maybe I don’t love the slithering creatures that destroy treasured plants at night, but I do feel a sense of satisfaction when I save my little beauties from them.

But sometimes, even when I’m pursuing the thing I love doing the most, bad things can happen. Really bad things. Life changing bad things. Like in Nipped in the Budwhen I find the city manager dead on the playground I’m renovating for the city. That is bad. Really bad. And it doesn’t take long for it to get ugly.

Not with Police Chief Mitch Lawson hoping to bring this case to a quick resolution, that if he has his way, features me as the guilty party. He not only has a grudge against me—something about ruining his chance to play professional football—but then I had to go and yell at the city manager and even threaten him mere hours before he was murdered. Couple that with circumstantial evidence and even some suspicious forensic evidence, and I am fighting to stay out of jail by trying to solve the murder on my own.

So won’t you join me in Nipped in the Bud? I promise I’ll bring this killer to justice and there’s never a dull moment while I hunt him or her down and struggle to keep my radio show going and my business afloat.