Let’s talk poison

No, not that Poison. (And, might I say, Ew? Looks like these guys cornered the market in lip collagen injections.)

Yeah, that poison.

Today, I’m thinking about writing. This is an improvement. At least I’m thinking, plotting, speculating, devising, and not playing Diablo II on Nightmare level.

Lisa, my alien abductee, is on hold for the moment. I’ve lost interest. She’s in good paws and claws and no irreversible harm will come to her while I come to my senses. Besides, if I try hard enough I can come up with a dozen excellent reasons why I should be working on getting an agent for my romance / finishing the editing on my SF trilogy / saying screw-it-all to writing, it’s never going to eclipse my day job, so shouldn’t I focus on the doctoring thing, instead? (#3 has been winning the day of late.) Thinking about a new project should be the last thing on my mind.

But what the hell. When you get right down to it, it’s a mental health issue. This is my outlet, the way some guys watch sports, or some restore vintage cars, or some spend six hours a day reviewing Internet porn sites. At least writing doesn’t cost anything much and it exercises my brain.

***

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to write a novel in which my characters from this story are all grown up and rarin’ to cause trouble. Our hero is Russ, a guy who became a doctor in order to rein in his sociopathic tendencies. Naturally, scratch the surface on this doc and the sociopath is alive and well underneath. His friend Carl never felt the need to hide his true nature; adult Carl is a high-priced button man.

The setting is a small town hospital, the victim, the hospital CEO who runs the place like a fiefdom (complete with droit de seigneur). Russ is a new doc in town, and he hasn’t been there much more than a week or two when Carl shows up for a visit. Soon after, the CEO shows up in the ER with life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. He soon lands in the morgue, but not before visiting the ICU, Radiology, and the OR, too.

FBI gets involved — they’re investigating the CEO and the hospital for Medicare fraud when the CEO drops dead. The CEO was about to rat on the CFO as well as the higher-ups in the not-for-profit corporation which owns the hospital, so the feebies suspect foul play; and it hasn’t escaped their attention that Carl and his old friend Russ are in town*. Russ, in fact, attended to the CEO in the ER, and the two were together at the local karaoke bar earlier that evening. Russ has to figure out who, if anyone, offed the CEO, or he risks having the FBI poking their noses into his and Carl’s business. Carl certainly can’t handle the exposure, nor can Russ. (Childhood mischief aside, there was that time in med school when Carl helped Russ with a nasty little problem . . .)

So. Anyway. I googled “untraceable poison” this morning and found this great group blog, Poe’s Deadly Daughters, which is sort of a murder mystery parallel of Romancing the Blog. Poe’s Deadly Daughters had a guest blogger last November, Doug P. Lyle MD, who authored this terrific little post: The Myth of the Untraceable Poison.

Dr. Lyle has written lots of cool-looking books on forensics for mystery writers, so I bought a couple this morning. Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers I had to pick up used over at Amazon; I bought Howdunit Forensics from Barnes and Noble, along with James Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Mystery. Hey, why write when I can read?

Besides . . . if I know one thing about writing mysteries, it’s that you can’t have too much planning. I can handle the humor and the kinky sex (which this novel would have in abundance, given its author), but I need help with the mystery and the police procedural and the crime lab bits. Not my cuppa.

My only regret is that these books won’t arrive in time for my trip to Washington.

D.

*That will only make sense if you’ve read my short story. If you haven’t and you don’t care to, here’s the spoiler: when they were kids, Carl killed Russ’s abusive step-dad with Carl’s assistance. Carl’s mom helped in the cover-up. They both got away with it, but anyone probing Russ and Carl’s past would find the circumstances suspicious.