A Beautiful Poison by Lydia Kang (2017)

Dr. Kang pens a gripping tale woven through the fabric of World War I and the Spanish Flu. The story opens up at an engagement party for a young, New York socialite that speaks to her affluent life. Two childhood friends are in attendance, but they are notably out-of-place . . . they’re poor. One is a young woman whose mother had been the household help until she fell out of favor. Another, a young man whose parent’s met financial ruin and took the easy way out, leaving him orphaned.

When a party guest falls dead, it provides the self-absorbed socialite an opportunity to pull her childhood friends back into her world. To her, solving the mystery of the guest’s death is no more than a whimsical adventure. To her friends, life is more of a day-to-day struggle to survive. For the young woman, she does everything possible not to fall into her mother’s world of prostitution. For the young man, he wants to attend medical school, but the dream is far-off from his job as a janitor at Bellevue’s city morgue. As more individuals are poisoned, the mystery deepens as to who could be the culprit and a possible motive.

The story speaks to the chasm that existed between the wealthy and the destitute of the time. The theme is so engraved throughout the book, the author strikes you with it, again and again, like cymbals clashing amid a soft symphonic piece. Poison is the weapon of the passive-aggressive killer, so the reader often doesn’t see this person coming.

Post-Mortem by Patricia Cornwell (1990)

This accomplished author takes the reader into a medical examiner’s office to investigate a series of homicides by strangulation. Dr. Kay Scarpetta is the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia who works alongside a local detective and an FBI profiler to bring this killer to justice before another murder occurs. To her, it is the dead who tell the story that needs to be told. She uses cutting-edge scientific techniques and deductive prowess in analyzing and interpreting evidence to aid law enforcement.   But more women are being attacked and pressure is mounting.

As a woman, Dr. Scarpetta often clashes up against those in male-dominated positions of authority, making her job more of a struggle than it was for her good-old-boy predecessor. She fears that she herself may be the victim of sabotage by city officials. The protagonist wonders if her thoughts are just paranoia, “. . . the poison of an imagination gone berserk.”  Her stress is intensified as the killer moves almost seamlessly through the city.

Tension builds throughout this book as the author punctuates her words to describe the gruesome torture of the victims, the protagonist’s desperation and abject fear with her ultimate confrontation with the killer. The words are stressed, pressured, and raw. What speaks to anxiety and fear more than, nerves were humming like power lines? Anxiety is contagious . . .  and the reader feels it too.

Toxin by Robin Cook (1998)

Dr. Cook is often credited with popularizing the medical thriller and with good reason. In the novel, a divorced, egotistical, condescending cardiac surgeon feels his practice and patients are being suffocated by a recent hospital merger and the limitations placed on him by managed care. An increased workload with reduced reimbursement cuts into the father’s precious time he spends with his adolescent daughter. He’s late picking her up one Friday night, but his daughter still hasn’t eaten. He takes her to a fast-food restaurant and the girl orders a burger.

As the title of the book implies, the daughter is poisoned by a toxin produced by a variant of e coli found in the hamburger meat. His daughter’s condition deteriorates. The surgeon takes it upon himself to confront the powerful beef industry and its unsafe processing practices. There is nothing that’s going to stop him . . . and I mean nothing to a point the reader feels on edge with skin prickling and an unnerving sense of eggshells underfoot. By book’s end, there’s that haunted feeling I alluded to earlier when the story doesn’t quite come to a definitive end, leaving the reader to wonder what slipped through the cracks, and whose child might be next . . . or if something like this could actually happen to you. That’s what makes Toxin a great medical thriller!