The Poison Master

[sawyl]

It's not been all work this week. Somehow I've managed to find time to chomp through The Poison Master by Liz Williams.

Alivet Dee is hard working alchemist, struggling to make enough money to buy her sister out of the slavery of the Lords of Night, brewing up drugs to keep the local aristocracy amused. When one of her clients dies immediately after taking one of her narcotic concoctions, Alivet is forced to flee the marshy, Tudor planet of Latent Emanation in the company of the Ari Ghairen, the tricksy, untrustworthy Poison Master. Locked up in Ghairen's lab on the planet Hathes and given a week to concoct a potion that will kill the Lords of Night, Alivet gets caught up in the plots and machinations of the Poison Master's household, never quite knowing who to trust or who to believe.

Poison Master is every bit as intelligent as Empire of Bones, but very different in tone and subject matter. The plot involves elements from the Kabbalah, shamanism, alchemy and Tudor history but in a way that never seems to drag or hinder. In a particularly nice touch, each of the sections of the book is named after an appropriate alchemical technique and starts with a short, fictional moment in the life of Dr John Dee which helps to explain how humanity got to Latent Emanation in the first place.