Saturday Slaughters - A Positive Review at Last!

 

So this month we read Beloved Poison by E S Thomson. Turns out it was the first in a series, but it worked well as a stand alone. 

The book is set in 1850 and centres on a crumbling hospital which is about to be demolished to make way for a new railway, and on some of the people who work there. The discovery during the demolition  of six small coffins containing whittled wood babies and dry bouquets sets off an investigation which results in death, madness and mayhem, although to be honest there's quite  a lot of (concealed) madness to start with. It's very Gothic i tone, so for those who Gothic repels or upsets, don;t go near it. 

Everyone else,Id say give it a go. The research seems excellent, it's certainly fitted seamlessly into the  narrative and apart from a few moments of Grand Guignol it's a very realistic picture of London in the mid nineteenth century. The writing is excellent; cinematic, but also evoking the sounds, taste and smells of a Victorian city - all done without the author figuratively jumping up and down and saying Look! Look! I'm a brilliant writer. 

Some of the group thought it was slow to start, although I didn't think so, if anything if we're talking pace I thought the denouement was possibly a bit rapid, and there were small perhaps inconsistent plot points that could be explained away if you thought about them hard enough. I thought it was a splendid, if occasionally hard-to-take read, and I will probably pre-order the Kindle version of Book 2 which is due out in September.