E.S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison is a slow burn of a mystery, at least until a third of the way through and someone finally gets murdered. Then the corpses proliferate and our protagonist gets followed by thugs and it’s clear we’re finally off to the races. In addition to the twisty mystery, Beloved Poison offers a look inside a London hospital in 1846, a time when the old guard surgeons (with coats so stiff with blood they could stand on their own) were starting to lose ground to up-and-comers who talked about radical notions like antisepsis.
St. Saviour’s Hospital is almost in worse shape than many of the Londoners who come there for treatment. The hospital governors have made a deal to sell the land to a railway company and rebuild elsewhere. Jem Flockhart, our protagonist, is not happy about this. Jem grew up in the hospital, working for her apothecary father, and does not want to start over somewhere else. (Jem is disguised as a man so that she can work. This isn’t a spoiler since Jem’s biological sex is revealed fairly early in the book.) She’s even more annoyed when she has to share space with Will Quartermain, the young architect who’s been hired to relocate the bodies in St. Saviour’s cemetery.
In the first third of Beloved Poison, we learn a lot about Dr. Bain and why several people at the hospital might want to kill him. He’s the first victim in this book, but only because Jem and Will discovered six strange, witchy paper coffins with dolls behind a decaying wall in the hospital chapel. Jem has an inquiring mind and she immediately starts to ask questions about where the dolls came from. Unfortunately, the dolls turn out to be the tip of a gristly iceberg. The mystery is baffling—both to Jem and Will, and to me—and it takes a lot of investigating, interviewing, and ratiocinating to get to the bottom of everything.
I really liked Jem. Her gender and sexuality are fascinating. She can’t fully be a Victorian man (because so many of them expect to spend time at the local brothels), but she can’t become a woman because she has neither the interest or the talent for it. Jem’s outsider status gives her a critical eye for how men and women relate to each other in her narrow, hierarchical world. The fact that she’s in love with the top surgeon’s daughter is a tantalizing addition to the story.
Between the setting and the unusual mystery, I was quite entertained by Beloved Poison. It could have used a bit more editing, I think, to smooth the rough transitions and develop the ending a bit more. I feel that the characters and their backstories threatened (often) to become more engrossing than the actual mystery. Beloved Poison could easily have become a sprawling, Dickensian slice-of-life bildungsroman—and I think I would have loved the book even more for it.