Blue Poppy (1997)

Skye Kathleen Moody's second Venus Diamond mystery was published by St. Martin's Press in 1997. Venus, an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, takes the department helicopter up the coast from Seattle to Fern, Washington, where a security guard has found the body of a lepidopterist in an ecological preserve near the meadow in which the Avalon parfumerie grows blue poppies for their fragrance. (Open Library)

Watches

Swatch watch: Venus reads her Swatch through the case: waking in her car at a quarter to ten exactly after a blow that may have left her concussed (p. 158), after a wasted business dinner (p. 173), and while she lets Mimi, the woman she calls the Budge, sob into her hands, watching the second hand sweep one and a half circles before she speaks (p. 176). Looking down into the moonlit meadow it reads eleven fifty-six, then midnight, and the Tibetan gong sounds (p. 239). She reads a Swatch in Habitat too. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Venus watched the second hand on her Swatch rotate one full circle, another half circle, then the Budge raised her head (Skye Kathleen Moody, Blue Poppy, scan cataloged as St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 176; Internet Archive scan OCR)