The most definitive thing to be said about spurge laurel is that it isn’t. It isn’t spurge, it isn’t laurel, and although it’s noxious and unpleasant and toxic, it isn’t definitively useful to the individual thinking about bumping off their mother-in-law or their boss or their ex, or any number of other potential subjects, unless the subject is …

For a period of time in my childhood, I fed the chickens. The job had its ups and downs. The thrill of excitement that comes with placing a tin can firmly over the chicken’s head with one hand, lifting the soft, pulsating body of feathers with the other, and finding the smooth-pebbled globe nestled in the straw …

On a mid-spring morning in 2012, a Nova Scotia father knocked on his teenage son’s bedroom door. Cole Marchand had been experiencing gastrointestinal upset for a day or two, and father Darrell was checking to see whether the mild over-the-counter remedy he’d gotten for Cole had made any difference.

Some of the most effective murders can be explained by bad luck: accidentally touching the wrong thing, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not death by intent, not even death by ignorance; simply death by happenstance.

As a mystery writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill people. But I like my murder to take place offstage, without a lot of blood. So I also spend a lot of time thinking about poisons.

I also like to garden.