Beloved Poison follows Jem Flockhart - an apothecary working in St Saviours hospital in the 1800s, with a secret. Jen is actually Jemima but has pretended to be a man her entire life in order to inherit and continue her father’s apothecary business. When Jem finds six tiny coffins in the abandoned church in the hospital, and people begin showing up dead, she knows she has a mystery on her hand and with the help of her architect friend Will, sets out to solve it.

This was a really, really interesting book and I highly enjoyed my reading experience of it. First off, the main plot of the coffins and murders is expertly crafted and the horror of it is weaved magically throughout the books. The tone of the book is set very early on with the discovery of the coffins, which contains small dolls soaked in blood. I really enjoyed figuring out the mystery with Jem and while normally I feel like I have a strong idea on who the mysterious killer is, this time I really had no clue. I was jumping between all the characters.

This book mixes horror and delight in equal measure. It has a strong gothic horror feel to it, and there were times it had me squirming in my boots. From the doctor’s body being gleefully used for ‘medical science’ by his nemesis, cracked open, bones boiled, the lot to Jem touching tongues with a corpse to taste the last thing they had eaten. SHUDDER!

And now I want to talk about Jem because I found her fascinating. I’m going to be using female pronouns for her as when she was talking about herself it’s what she used and she did describe herself as a woman typically, though once she did use the term a “man trapped in a woman’s body.” I would definitely class Jem as being on the queer spectrum but I wouldn’t necessarily call her transgender as she was forced into the role by her father when she was young - she is very tall and broad with large hands and feet and so doesn’t seem to have a problem passing as a man. I also should mention her birthmark which covers the top half of her face - the writing about this was also really great and the little tics Jem has to ‘hide herself’ away from the world and how people tend to view her when they see the birthmark (though again, they probably would view a man with this birthmark better than if she was a woman). I found Thomson’s writing of Jem absolutely fascinating and fantastic. Most of the time, I almost forgot myself that Jem was a woman! It was really excellent writing.

The only reason I didn’t give this five stars is because of all the foreshadowing. There was just too much of it and it spoiled the story a little bit for me. There were so many times Jem was describing a scene and then would say something along the lines of “if only I knew then what I know now…” and it was just too much really.

I really, really loved this one though and would 100% recommend. I can’t wait for more books in this series!