The Lost Apothecary

Eh. Love the cover, was excited to read some historical-pharmacist-murder mystery but it was none of those, basically.

In present-day London, Caroline Parcewell is taking a solo trip to London to recover from the shock of finding out about her husband's infidelity. While mudlarking on the River Thames, she finds a mysterious engraved vial that leads her on an investigative journey to find out the truth behind an “apothecary serial killer” from the 1790s.

While I never felt that the central mystery was boring per se, and I never felt like the book dragged, at the same time I also had no burning desire to find out anything about the characters, their relationship, or the answers to anything happening at all. The dual timelines happening here felt a little unnecessary, and I kind of wished that we had simply one linear timeline with more horizontal development for the characters and issues there.

I went into this a little worried that this was going to turn into a blanket “all men are trash” hate-fest. I'm all for female empowerment and exploring issues revolving around women, but I don't feel that this has to be achieved at the price of falling back on just another form of sexism. The book skirts around that, but luckily doesn't quite toe the line there, IMO. The narrative just shies away from going all out on the misandry, although there was certainly a lot more of that in the historical timeline (although understandably so given the gender inequalities of that time period).

What the book perhaps lacked doing was having actually more redeeming male characters. There were only two prominent male characters here (Mr Amwell and James) and I thoroughly hated both of them. The one and only redeeming male character, Tom Pepper, was barely around for 5 pages. I was also largely indifferent to the main female characters, Eliza, Nella, and Caroline. While both their timelines took turns being the more interesting one, I never really felt attached to any of them. The writing for Nella's perspective felt a little too involved, over-serious, and overwrought in a way, that I was either annoyed, or couldn't take it seriously. Eliza was slightly better, but nothing much happens with her or to her (aside from that horrifying incident with Mr Amwell which was thankfully averted - I really would not have wanted to read about that). Caroline and her marriage was just a constant source of frustration and annoyance to me throughout the book, although she got more tolerable as a character as the book wore on and as she drew further apart from James.

I just didn't understand what was the whole point of the adventures, both in 1790s and in the present-day, and why they were supposed to relate to each other? I get that Caroline had some character development in the sense that she went from gaslighting herself about how she felt about James, to properly realising that she needed to pursue her own dreams and get away from him - that's fine, but i don't feel like it was clear how that related to her whole adventure with the apothecary's bottle. I'm even more unclear about what Eliza's role was, aside from her last sacrificial act and magic trick of turning up alive again. Also, how did she make such a strong, amazing, and effective tincture to protect her from drowning and frigid waters on her first try?! She barely got any tutelage from Nella before this! I just felt like the connection between the storylines in the 1790s and present-day wasn't very strong.

The central mystery with Lady Clarence just really fell flat for me. When I checked my progress and saw it at about 75% through, I was like, “Wait, you mean this is the main mystery of the book?!” It all felt like a side story leading up to something bigger because the stakes never felt high to me. The overall ending was okay - I didn't even expect it to be super mind-blowing but it still fell a little flat for me. The twist about Eliza surviving her fall just felt a bit... eh whatever. And we never even really found out what happened to Nella after she reunited with Eliza at the end.

I was also super confused about this whole big deal they made out of this “apothecary serial killer” in both the blurb for the book as well as in the story itself. There wasn't a lot of focus on the whole apothecary aspect aside from those two poisons that Nella made. There wasn't a ton of serial-killing-ness as I was led to believe either since only two men died in the whole course of the book, really. In terms of the narrative, how on earth did she become associated as a serial killer or having it termed as "murders" when the police really only knew about her involvement with Lord Clarence's death?. The book felt mainly focused on these 3 women struggling with individual issues around their relationship with men, which is fine but definitely wasn't what I expected going in and didn't come through in the blurb of the book. Even then, I also felt like that wasn't properly explored because all those gimmicks around it regarding the dual timelines, the apothecary murders, etc. really distracted the narrative from that, so everything felt really disjointed and “what's the point of this?” in the end.

All in all, I'm hovering between 2 and 3 for this one. In the first 2 chapters, i was already feeling a 3/5 but hoped it would prove me wrong. Oh well.