Review: The Poison Artist

The Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After having a fight with his girlfriend, toxicologist Caleb Maddox meets an alluring, mysterious woman in a bar and becomes obsessed with her. As he tracks the woman down, he gets entangled in a case involving people being poisoned and dumped in San Francisco bay. But what was his fight with his girlfriend about and what dark secret is he hiding? Will his obsession get in the way of solving the case or will he find himself trapped in something a thousand times as sinister?

I got this book from the publisher and sat on it for about a month. Honestly, ARCs feel like homework a lot of the time and I'm getting to be more choosy with my reading time. However, Kemper said it was good so I finally knuckled under and gave it a read.

Well, that hoople head was right again. I should have cracked this open as soon as it arrived on my doorstep. The Poison Artist is a creepy thriller that wrapped around my brain stem as soon as I read a few pages.

Caleb Maddox is a man running from a dark and damaged past. It seemed he had everything together until a fight with his girlfriend. While trying to wash himself down the drain with alcohol, he meets a sexy stranger and becomes entranced. Couple that with a serial killer and a lot of absinthe, and there are a lot of balls in the air.

As I said before, this was one gripping read. As Caleb went further off the rails trying to find Emmeline, I couldn't set the book aside. The Poison Artist was my absinthe.

The tales of Caleb's break-up, his obsession with Emmeline, and his mysterious past converge in a horrifying fashion. I thought I had a pretty good idea how things would go after the initial setup but I was wrong. Turns out Jonathan Moore can weave a pretty fucked up web. He had me second-guessing myself quite a few times.

Jonathan Moore manages to weave obsession, hard science, murder and into an absinthe-fueled thriller. Four out of five stars.

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