THE POWER OF POISON

A pathologist and toxicologist who moonlights as an Agency assassin gets recruited for an operation that hits devastatingly close to home in this thriller sequel.

Grigory Markovic, the Russian criminal “behind the biggest terror threat to this country,” is still out there, and he knows Dr. Lily Robinson’s identity. It has only been a few months since Robinson helped foil Markovic’s mass poisoning plot. Now, he’s looking to hook up with the North Koreans, who are conspiring with scientist Dr. Wei Guan, a Chinese middleman, to purchase his deadly new technology, which could unleash catastrophic chemical warfare. Robinson’s assignment from the Agency is to use her “encyclopedic knowledge of toxins” to kill Guan without obvious bloodshed. This is what she does on her “away time” from her job as a medical school professor and toxicology consultant. The assassinations are a clear violation of her Hippocratic oath, but the lives she saves allow her to rationalize the killings. It is also her way to stay busy to stem the guilt over losing her daughter years before while Robinson was on a field trip in the jungles of Colombia. “I wish I had my baby, my Rose,” she laments. “Someone to save the world for.” It is not too much of a spoiler to note that one of Robinson’s new students bears a resemblance to her. “There are so many loose ends to tie,” as one character notes at one point, and Magnani does an efficient job of juggling the backstory for those who did not read the first book in this fledgling series. The author also deftly manages a gallery of characters with the requisite suspicious motivations and allegiances, so many that Robinson disappears from the narrative for stretches at a time. (Her chapters are the only ones written in the first person, which can be distracting.) The science of toxins is well rendered, and Magnani crafts some indelible images (“The moon, full in the sky, round and bright, with a ribbon of dark clouds rippled across its face like the mask of the Lone Ranger”). But as the story reaches an emotional climax, readers may be inclined to agree with Robinson when she admits: “I’m not sure I can take any more revelations.”

A refreshingly unconventional hero in a fitfully effective thriller.