With the July Fourth holiday staring us in the face with its usual high heat and humidity, I thought it appropriate to pass on a recipe for a refreshing drink from the hero of my Black Orchid Chronicles.

Sebastian Arnett takes photos of flowers, orchids in particular. Orchids grow best in warm, humid locales, so after a morning of shooting, he likes to cool off with a libation.

His favorite, of course, is Tanqueray gin and tonic. In his words:

 “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I said, as I fixed drinks in the pantry off the kitchen. We both preferred gin—Hendricks and a chunk of lime for the old man, Tanqueray classic and diet tonic, 50-50 proportions, with a large wedge of lime for me.

Here’s how he does it:

Ice melts quickly under the influence of all that gin.

1. Fill tall glass with ice.
2. Squeeze one-quarter lime (or more) over ice.
3. Fill glass half-way with gin.
4. Add tonic (diet tonic if you drink a lot of them ’cause tonic water is like mainlining sugar).
5. Stir, don’t shake. (James Bond insists; Sebastian just doesn’t own a shaker.)
6. Bottoms up!

Note: Tanqueray is NOT sponsor of this blog, but some days I wish it were.

Spiders have a long history of appearances in literature, and my new Black Orchid Chronicle, Beware the Spider will just add to it.

In Beware the Spider, nature photographer Sebastian Arnett becomes the target of ruthless Chinese crime lords who want to use his power to kill without touching. When they kidnap the woman he loves, the battle is to the death.

And Empaya Iba, the spider demon who cursed Sebastian and gave him his lethal powers, faces threats from mysterious flying spirits.

Sebastian must save the demon he loathes to keep the power of the curse to save his lover.

As for those other spiders:

• Yes, there is Spider-Man, although it’s a man, not a spider. And how fearsome can someone be with the nickname, Spidey?
• Then there’s the Itsy Bitsy Spider and the water spout. Although at my kindergarten, we called it the Teensy-Weensy Spider.
• The most-loved spider has to be Charlotte in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Who can forget the farewell message she wove in her web?
• J.R.R. Tolkien features Shelob in The Two Towers:

.  .  . she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness

• Then there’s Aragog of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
• Neil Gaiman wrote of The Anansi Boys, sons of the West African spider god, that I just couldn’t get through but which my son swears by.
• No less than Walt Whitman wrote a two-stanza poem entitled “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
• In Greek mythology, Arachne  was turned into a spider after losing a weaving content to the goddess Athena. And we got our name for the spider family, arachnid.

A tip of the hand and hearty Thank You to thepurplebroom blog and its post “Spiders in Literature, Mythology and Witchcraft” for reminding me of Shelob and Aragog.

For those who can’t get enough of spiders, I recommend this bibliography, which includes Emily Dickenson’s spider-related poems, and this Wikipedia list of fictional arthropods, which contains many spider references.

And finally, if you’d like to see some spiders looking back at you, I refer you to Jimmy Kong’s Flickr blog. (Spoiler alert, not for people with arachnophobia.)

Beware the Spider will be available June 3.