The Poison Artist
Jonathan Moore
The Poison Artist
Jonathan Moore
Dr Caleb Maddox is an expert on pain. A leading San Francisco toxicologist, he is mapping the chemical traces that show how much agony a human body can endure. But now a different kind of pain is distracting him from his life’s work - the violent break-up of his relationship with his artist girlfriend, Bridget.
Seeking solace in a secluded bar, he meets a beautiful woman who shares an absinthe with him, then disappears into the night. Instantly obsessed, he starts trawling the hidden byways of the city to try and find her. And when he does, she insists on a bizarre set of rules before he can meet her alone. But even as he tries to lose himself in Emmeline’s darkly erotic world, Caleb finds himself inexorably drawn back to the study of pain and death.
For weeks the police have been fishing corpses out of the bay, with no clue as to how they died, and Caleb’s old friend, medical examiner Henry Newcomb, asks him to decipher the chemical puzzles left in the bloated remains. Soon Caleb discovers evidence of an unspeakable horror connecting all the victims, suggesting that the city is prey to a deranged killer.
And then he discovers that one of the dead men was last seen at the same bar the night he met Emmeline.
Suddenly Caleb is plunged into a nightmare where love, madness and murder are clasped in a lethal embrace - and untangling the truth could be the last thing he wants to do.
Review
Fiona Hardy
In a San Franciscan hotel, Caleb Maddox cleans the cut on his forehead. His girlfriend threw a crystal tumbler at his head, and it didn’t miss. It’s all he can do to fix himself up and then go and find solace from what happened – what she did, and what he did that made her do it. So he leaves to find a bar and lose himself in something, maybe whiskey, maybe everything. But then she comes through the door, in a black dress that swims against her skin, drinking absinthe with a cube of sugar. He doesn’t know her name, or anything about her. But he knows this: that he needs to find her again. What he doesn’t know is that he shouldn’t.
This book is such an eloquent, delicately macabre mystery right from the start. We know so little of Caleb, even as we follow him and his head injury from bar to bar, from bottle to glass, and from unconsciousness on his couch to the sharp realities of his work. As a renowned toxicologist, currently researching how the story of a person’s physical pain is told in their blood, he is famous, hunted for his knowledge, but close to losing financing. And when a colleague asks for his advice on a dead body, it seems he is not the only one fascinated by how much people can suffer. The Poison Artist is seductive, haunting, and intimate; literature as intoxicating as rare spirits and as unnerving as the spiked tip of a needle.
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