Poison is a thriller set in primarily in the Emergency Room where Dr. Emma Steele works. People who visit the ER are returning as codes or dropping dead within a few days of their initial ER visit. But only her most vile patients are dying: the child abusers, wife beaters, even a child burgeoning sociopath. As a physician, I appreciated the accuracy with which Jones presents clinical details. Her protagonist, Emma Steele, is interesting and well-rounded, strong, but flawed. She’s a divorcée, well on her way to becoming an alcoholic, the mother of a pregnant, drug-using teenaged daughter. Emma handles all these problems while dealing with the life-and-death situations that arise in her ER. As the product of an abusive mother, she finds it hard to feel any remorse over the deaths of such loathsome people. At the same time, she confronts the moral dilemma that even the wicked deserve to live. As it becomes clear that a serial killer is at work, she starts snooping, trying to solve the mystery herself. She doesn’t have a lot of sleuthing to do as there is only one contender for the role, something I found rather disappointing. This is the third and final volume in the ER Crimes, the Steele Files series, but it worked well as a stand-alone. Although some characters from earlier books make cameo appearances here, their relationships are all well-defined in book #3. This book is told in an omniscient point of view with an occasional divergence in to the POV of Guinness, Dr. Steele’s German Shepherd, arguably one of the best characters in the book. Overall, I found it less of a thriller and more along the lines of a cozy mystery.
********************
Poison and the other books in the ER Crimes, the Steele Files series (Overdose and Mercy) are available through Amazon.
