Interesting premise, an apothecary that sells poison for women to kill their husbandos &c??! Sign me the fuck up, right? But as I kept on reading, I started to get less excited about this book. First of all, the chapters are all incredibly short, we’re jumping back and forth from the 1700s and to present day and each chapters end with a cliffhanger which frustrated me. One moment a character jumps off the bridge, then the scene ends abruptly and we move back to present day where I have to read about something that I just didn’t care about. There was this one scene where Caroline finally discovered the lost apothecary and she couldn’t even explore because it was dark and she had to use her phone’s flashlight and her phone was dying quickly so she ended up taking random shots and didn’t even check the photos UNTIL the next day which happened 2 chapters later and since it was building up so much to the discovery of that place and turns out I had to wait more to find out the state the apothecary was in?! LIKE supposedly it was the first time a person’s down there in 200 years, I wanted the description of how decrepit the place is, I want to KNOW. Also, are you telling me, the place goes unnoticed in 200 years because it supposedly is soooo hard to find, but some random ass woman with an iphone weak ass flashlight found it under one hour?! Omg those 18th century constables are so dumb, am i right?! Man, I was upset about that. I just wanted to scream at the book like “TELL ME NOW! STOP DELAYING! TELL ME NOW!” Maybe the author wanted to keep us at the edge of our seats, but it happened so often that I just ended up getting mad about it. It felt jarring to me. I feel like the characters are not developed enough, not enough time has passed for each timelines so we couldn’t get to know the characters and see their relationships developed so it all fell flat because I couldn’t connect to any of them. And the dumbest scene of it all, probably should be poetic or whatever, but the vial Caroline found during mudlarking that sets off this whole thing... YUP this piece of historic glass vial... she just threw it back into the thames. MA’AM?!