“Poe won’t even take medicine when he’s supposed to. He’s been prescribed codeine for an abscess in his tooth and I found the unfilled prescription a fortnight ago in a book he was reading. He’d written a list of his favourite sausages on the back.”
THE BOTANIST by MW Craven is a joyful burst of pure pulp fiction. Craven specialises in vastly over-complicated murder plots, and this, the fifth in his Washington Poe sequence, is him trying to top himself. It is, frankly, fucking absurd. And once you accept that, and accept that Craven himself accepts that and is just telling you a completely over-the-top weird crime yarn, you can relax into it.
I’ve only read the third and fourth of the sequence, and I suspect you’ll get the most out of this if you’ve read at least one of those. But, if you’ve read the last one and were unsure about this one – yeah, Craven goes for it, and puts energy into moving the world forward.
It is built around two demented locked-room mysteries, the solutions for which are so incredibly complicated and overwrought that I couldn’t help but laugh along with the author as he stacked his bricks up.
Supposedly there is a sixth book in the pipeline. Not sure he tops this one for plot mentalism. Maybe he switches gears. I’ll be curious to see.
Anyway. If you, like me, have just ground through a bunch of dry non-fiction books, this may be the weird palate cleanser you need.
THE BOTANIST, MW Craven (link)