This is one of those books that I randomly saw on the list of available mystery / suspense / thriller audiobooks list at my library. I usually just search for audiobooks that are in English, “Available now”, and fall into the horror, mystery, suspense, or thriller categories. Those are my preferred genres of books. I’ll also throw in some science fiction, but that’s neither here nor there. Sometimes I feel like I get on a streak of crappy or boring books with this random approach to reading books! If you’ve read my earlier reviews from this year, you can see that there have definitely been some stinkers. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised with this book.
It starts out with a teacher named Teddy Crutcher. You can tell almost immediately that he’s a little odd. He’s kind of obsessive and controlling about teaching, and he’s definitely stuffy. His students try to impress them, because they go to a prestigious school where everyone’s supposed to go to an Ivy League college, so their grades matter.
I think the first person to die by poisoning is a student’s mother. It’s an accident in that the person didn’t mean to poison the student’s mother, and they didn’t mean to kill her. It was just supposed to be some agony for another teacher. Then more people start dropping. A student is accused and sent to jail, but we all know she didn’t do it.
We learn more and more about Teddy’s experiments and chemistry / botany projects throughout the book. This is one of those books where the bad guy eventually gets his comeuppance, but without a whole heck of a lot of collateral damage!
I’d recommend this book if you have some time to kill (pun intended). 3.5 stars
