The Queen of Poisons, by Robert Thorogood

When the Mayor of Marlow suddenly drops dead after a seemingly innocuous cup of coffee, amateur crime sleuths Suzie Harris, Judith Potts and Becks Starling set out to solve the mystery. 

In the idyllic English town of Marlow, local Suzie Harris decides to look in on a council meeting. Her intentions aren’t particularly civic. She intends to find out who the weakest council members are, the ones who can possibly be influenced, or bent to Suzie’s will. The reason? Suzie always has a side project going, and she wants to install a Japanese pod-style hotel in her backyard. She needs council approval. While watching the meeting get ready to take place, she notices Mayor Geoffrey Lushington  make himself a coffee. Minutes later he keels over, dead. The first thing Suzie does is to call her good friend, Judith Potts. It’s clear they have another murder to solve.

​There are three women - Suzie, Judith, and their friend Becks Starling, wife of the local Vicar - who form the crime solving trio. Judith is the most forthright of the group. In her early seventies, her style is crash or crash-through. Middle-aged Suzie is always a step behind Judith and shares her gung-ho approach. Becks is the more diplomatic of the trio, offering apologies for toes trodden on and clarifying to suspects and persons of interest that they are indeed not the police, despite their air of brash confidence. 

The trio are early on the scene of Geoffrey Lushington’s murder, and soon start trespassing on detective sergeant Tanika Malik’s investigative turf. She knows the women well from previous murder cases, and realising that they are an unstoppable force, decides to give them civilian  advisory roles, including official looking lanyards. The women are soon making inroads into the case, especially the unstoppable Judith Potts, working their way through the town’s suspects until the unlikely killer is caught. 

The Queen of Poisons (the title refers to aconite, the poison used to kill Geoffrey Lushington) is the third in Robert Thorogood’s Marlow Murder Club series. While the novel does read like something made for television (Thorogood is a successful TV writer), there is much to enjoy in its pages.The pacing is juicy and the humour is terrific, with the characters of all three women astutely drawn. They are all like people you’ve met in real life - the insufferably pushy Judith Potts, the blowsy Suzie Harris and Becks Starling, forever saying sorry and doing much of the trio’s emotional labour. The plot is well worked out and ticks like a finely tuned watch, with all the various parts falling nicely into place. The final ending has a bit of the pantomime about it, with the characters, situations and motivations all slightly nutty and overwrought. But nonetheless, this reader couldn’t pick the killer and was indeed surprised at the real culprit. 

A brilliant entertainment with a cast of characters you will immediately love.

The Queen of Poisons, by Robert Thorogood. Published by HQ Fiction. $32.99

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