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.

Fiona Hardy