Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

THE POISON ARTIST

Jonathan Moore

This is a gripping, finely written literary thriller about obsession and damage, about a decent man unmoored by an unspeakable past and a mysterious and irresistible woman who promises him the blissful dream of release and escape. There are echoes here of timeless noir narratives -- including Hitchcock's classic Vertigo but updated with fascinating CSI detail and accuracy and told with masterful pacing and a growing sense of menace that is truly chilling.

Dr. Caleb Maddox is a crack San Francisco toxicologist leading a NIH-funded study of the human pain threshold based on minute analysis of chemical markers. He has also just broken up with his artist girlfriend after a bitter argument. Caleb needs to get out of their house and retreats to a downtown hotel, then wanders out into the foggy evening in search of whiskey and solitude. At the House of Shields, a venerable old saloon, an exotic, delicately beautiful woman materializes out of the shadows, dressed like a 1940s movie star and scented with a perfume like midnight dew; she shares a pouring of absinthe with Caleb, brushes his arm and vanishes. An overwhelming romantic obsession blooms Caleb must find her and his desperate search leads him through the dark back ways of a brooding city. As he pursues Emmeline, he learns her painful secrets is she his salvation or something dangerous that lives in darkness? At the same time, Caleb becomes entangled in a serial murder investigation that has the police flummoxed men gone missing, fished out of the bay, with no clue as to how they met their grim demise. One of the men was at the bar the night Emmeline appearered. Caleb is questioned, but he can't offer any information. Meanwhile, after office hours, Caleb, a brilliant scientist, surreptitiously helps his old friend city coroner Henry Newcombe examine the victims and unravel the chemical evidence left in the bloated remains. The deeply drawn characters and the perfectly and powerfully rendered atmosphere (San Francisco has never felt more alluring) provide an emotional punch that will leave the reader involved in Caleb and Emmeline's strange journey long after the novel concludes. And being based on intensive research, the book also delivers fascinating scientific information on pain and more esoteric matters, like what happens to a body thrown into San Francisco Bay (and why it's particularly gruesome). The deep research Moore has done is not only interesting, it immediately gives the author real credibility, which creates the trust essential for a reader to truly lose themselves in the plot. Jonathan Moore is an attorney with the Honolulu firm of Kobayashi, Sugita & Goda. Before completing law school in New Orleans, he was an English teacher, the owner of Taiwan's first Mexican restaurant, a whitewater raft guide on the Rio Grande, a counselor at a Texas wilderness camp for juvenile sex offenders, and an investigator for a criminal defense attorney in Washington D.C..

Available products
Book Published 2016-01-01 by Houghton Mifflin

Comments

Newton Compton

...this thriller's twists become as dark and intoxicating as the bars where the mystery begins

THE POISON ARTIST is an electrifying read, building from shock to shock. I read the last 100 pages in a single sitting. The last chapter is an absolute stunner. I haven't read anything so terrifying since RED DRAGON. I was impressed by how smart Moore is about STUFF. Sewage outflow pipes, air ducts, etc. And of course it's romantic in a guy way. That's rare. I look forward to the next one.

Moore has a great gift for the macabre and the creepy.

With its crisp, vivid writing - not a word is wasted - and multi-layered plotting, The Poison Artist is as satisfying as it is deeply unsettling. Moore has conjured a disjointed but gorgeous absinthe dream that enfolds the reader like a deadly fog. Highly recommended.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Koridor Yayinlari

Orion (Bill Massey)

THE POISON ARTIST takes an old film noir set-up - man meets femme fatale and starts to fear that she might be even more dangerous than she looks - and brings it into the modern world...a superior cat and mouse story, with an effective twist in the tail.

"Patient, stylish and incredibly suspenseful." Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher Series

Featured as a best book of the month in the Mystery, Thriller & Suspense category on Amazon all February 2016

[an] exquisite tale of obsession the sympathetic, though brutally flawed hero and the shocking, Hitchcock-esque finale make this psychological thriller a must-read.-Publishers Weekly; starred, boxed review

With THE POISON ARTIST, Jonathan Moore has given us a brilliant debut thriller, confident, mesmerizing, edgy and very cool. So much happens on every page, it's almost dizzying. Hitchcock should come back from the grave and film this story.

Jonathan Moore has written a wickedly smart, emotionally complex novel that will haunt you long after you turn the last page. Whether you find it seductively terrifying or terrifyingly seductive, in my mind, THE POISON ARTIST is better than Hitchcock.

Vulkan Publishing (via Jill Hughes)

This is a cinematic and phantasmagoric treat... Obsession and violent death collide in an elegantly written thriller.

?This exquisite tale of obsession from Bram Stoker Awardfinalist Moore (Redheads) opens with Caleb Maddox, a toxicologist and pain researcher, looking in the mirror of a San Francisco hotel bathroom as he picks tiny shards of glass out of his bleeding forehead. A short time before, his live-in lover, now his ex-girlfriend, threw a tumbler in his face. It was good glass. Murano crystal, maybe, from a set they had bought at Macy's just before she moved in a year earlier. Caleb later leaves the hotel and goes to a bar called the House of Shields, where he meets a mysterious absinthe-drinking woman, Emmeline, who mesmerizes him with a whisper and a titillating silken touch. Caleb's hard-drinking week-plus pursuit of Emmeline parallels the serial killings that he has been secretly investigating with his oldest and closest friend, medical examiner Henry Newcomb. Male bodies have been washing up in the bay with evidence of unspeakable torture. The scientific lore and postmortem techniques may be more than some readers want to know, but the sympathetic, though brutally flawed hero and the shocking, Hitchcock-esque finale make this psychological thriller a must-read.

Spiralling down from dream into nightmare, The Poison Artist is thoroughly unnerving and classily executed

With crisp dialogue and skilled plotting, this atmospheric novelfittingly set in a dark and foggy December in San Franciscois an engrossing thriller by an author to watch. Give this one to readers who like forensic thrillers but would also be drawn in by the creepy mood.-Booklist - starred review

Hidra

Grand China Publishing (simplified)

A mysterious woman, a breakup, and a man haunted by his bloody and dark past coalesce in Moore's moody thriller. Moore writes beautiful prose and presents an atmospheric story he excels in the sensuousness of his writing: food, sex, alcoholhe fully engages all of the senses. Absinthe, oysters, the painter John Singer Sargent, a classic car, and a string of disturbing deaths, possibly brought about by poison, make this dark tale memorable.