Writer Covers New Ground With Botanical Mysteries : Books: Rebecca Rothenberg combines California agriculture and native plants with an engaging sleuth.

In the late ‘70s, not long after she had moved to Los Angeles from the East, Rebecca Rothenberg started hiking to discover her newly adopted homeland.

Step by step, she learned of the wonders of the Arroyo Seco of Pasadena. In the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, she was amazed by the stunning subtlety of the chaparral that leads to Echo Mountain, Strawberry Peak, Red Box and Mt. Wilson.

Later, the amateur botanist hiked in the Sierra, where she marveled at wildflowers which, she said, “make you just fall down on the ground” they are so beautiful.

At the same time, as a form of escape, she began intensely reading the work of traditional British mystery writers and American authors such as Dashiell Hammet and Tony Hillerman.

What she now calls her “constellation of obsessions”--California agriculture, native plants, biology, and mystery writing--all came together on a 1984 car trip to San Francisco via the San Joaquin Valley. She became fascinated then, she said, with small-town, agricultural life and the graceful marsh bulrushes there.

Thus, by happenstance more than design, the 44-year-old Highland Park resident became a mystery writer--specifically botanical mysteries.

Her first novel “The Bulrush Murders,” which was published late last year, combines her love of California native plants and her intrigue with agribusiness, water policy and racial tensions, she said.

And with the book she created what every mystery writer needs, an enduring and engaging sleuth. Claire Sharples is a sort of naive Nancy Drew of microbiologists whose fancy East Coast liberal education and values clashed instantly on her arrival to a new job as an agricultural researcher in the conservative farm country below the western Sierra. In Sharples, Rothenberg created an alter ego.

“She was more serious, more scientific than I was,” Rothenberg said. And beyond that, since Rothenberg was unhappy with her boyfriend at the time she was writing the book, it gave her the chance--through Sharples--to have an affair. Sharples leaves behind a failed relationship in the stuffy grayness of Boston, where she had worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I wanted to be living a slightly different life than I was living,” said Rothenberg, who at various times has worked as a research assistant for an economist at Caltech, an epidemiological computer programmer at USC and a songwriter. As a way to support her creative endeavors, she is a free-lance data analyst in public health.

Reviewers have praised the romance element--between Sharples and a nerdy, enigmatic fellow UC agricultural field station researcher--as one of the mystery’s best qualities. “You want them to make it, you’re never quite sure they will and thus the path is as rocky as true love requires,” wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer.

She considers Sharples her little sister, of sorts. But Rothenberg, who lived for four years in Nashville, Tenn., trying to make it as a pop music writer before coming to Los Angeles to try the same thing, said: “I’m not as begrudging as she is about country music. That’s one way I keep us straight. I like country music. She doesn’t.”

But both she and Sharples share a fascination for native California plants that so starkly differ from plants of the East Coast. Rothenberg, who is an officer in the San Gabriel Mountains chapter of the California Native Plant Society, grew up in a small town in Upstate New York.

In the book, one of the key botanical clues crops up after the first death. The handsome, cocky son from a family of Mexican-Americans who are struggling to make their small peach farm succeed is found dead in a lake. Nearby in the water is his motorcycle. Intertwined in the spokes is a subspecies of bulrush, Scirpus validus and Allenrolfia, iodineweed. Both plants, Sharples soon persuades law enforcement authorities, come from an area not around the lake and this confounds the cops’ theories about what happened.

At times, Rothenberg playfully weaves in other botanical information. In one scene when Sharples is being menaced by a co-worker, she pushes him into the dried, prickly thistles of Salsolis kali tumbleweed, which “had long ago made its way from the steppes of Russia to the great central valley of California.”

Rothenberg’s use of native plants brought her favorable critiques. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin said: “At the story’s center, always, is an affecting and insightful portrait of a bright woman struggling for simple equality in an environment as prickly and hostile as some of the wild grasses the author describes so well.”

One of her favorites is the bulrush, a green-stemmed plant that can grow 10 feet tall. “I’ve never seen anything like them. They’re not like East Coast marsh plants. They’re a lot more impressive,” she said. “And I like it also because of the association with Moses.”

Besides the native plants, the story involves issues of family strife, a mysterious ailment in a peach orchard and land-hungry developers from Los Angeles.

In part, she said, she wrote the book because she “wanted an excuse to do research on the central valley, agriculture and water policy.”

For that research, she said she “tooled around all these little towns like Weed Patch, Alpaugh and Wasco. It’s like falling in love. I fell in love with this area of California and I wanted to get to know it, the way you would someone you love. It was very Western but very Southern. Those are qualities I’m attracted to. I’m interested in the collision between Okie and Latino culture that happens up there.”

The starkness of the place also appeals to her, said Rothenberg, who in recent years acquired a cabin in the Sierra Sierras near Porterville. “So much of the West is stripped down so you can see the bones of the land, unlike the East which is lush and covered up,” she said. “That’s what I like about the West is--that bareness.”

Although she was a songwriter and took some English courses when she attended Swarthmore, an upscale private college in Pennsylvania, Rothenberg said she has never considered herself a writer. “I didn’t keep a journal when I was little,” she said. “I’m not a good storyteller. I’m not very good at thinking up plots.”

Now a member of L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime, Rothenberg did take a few poetry workshops and fiction-writing workshops when she started on the book in the mid-1980s.

She is certain, she said, that she only wants to write mysteries. Her models, she said, are science writers. She hopes to achieve “some kind of marriage of (writers) John McPhee and Jane Austen--because I wanted to write about relationships between people.”

She said, ‘I’m not a great writer. But I think I can be a good writer of quality mysteries about forensic botany.”

Already she has written a sequel and started books three and four--all with Sharples as the sleuth. “I want to deepen her, darken her. She is awfully facetious in that first book.”

In one of the unpublished books, a crucial clue comes from a mountain flower that is found in the lapel of a victim.

With mysteries, she said, “the good thing . . . is that you know that somebody is going to have to die. I try to have as few people as possible to die. I really don’t like mysteries that have wholesale slaughter or serial rape, torture and murder.”

That became clear, she said, when she went to a mystery genre convention in Pasadena last year and attended a panel of forensic experts. There was a graphic display of murder victims. When she looked at the crime scene photographs, she said: “I thought: ‘What am I doing here. How did I choose this genre? Am I thinking about the implications of this genre?’ But then the thought passed.”