Self-confident, smart and relentlessly curious, Cassandra Nottingham, a nationally recognized garden writer, is one of the attendees at a horticultural conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. While she looks forward to the usual round of cocktail parties, dinners and verbal skirmishes with her fellow rival garden writers, highest on her agenda is spending time with David Caldwell, a nursery owner attending the conference and her friend but not, sadly for Cass, her lover. Although she joked about how interesting it would be if one of her hated rivals were murdered at the conference, she's totally unprepared for the actuality. Determined to solve what turns out to be an attempted murder using a rare plant poison, followed by an actual murder by strangulation, Cass, along with her adversary, Detective Inspector Fairweather, races to catch the killer, a person who uses two different murder methods which throw everyone off the track. Cass and the Gluttonous Gardener also pits Cass against her fellow seminar attendees, all of whom have secrets and, Cass suspects, murderous intentions. She moves from one potential solution to another in her quest to find the killer before the police pin her with the crime, or the killer selects her as the next victim.