The Kindest Poison: a Cozy Culinary Murder Mystery with Retired Pharmacist Sleuth in Malaysian Hawker Centre

He was fifty-eight, and his legs ached, and everybody told him it was the weight coming off.A heavy man dies of kidney failure in a flat in Kampung Pandan, four kilometres from the second-tallest building on earth. Nobody is surprised. He had a doctor, a bad diet and thirty years of bad habits - and the only thing that changed in his last eight weeks was the slimming jamu his wife bought him in November.Madam Mariam Kee is sixty-seven, sells congee at half past five in the morning, and spent twenty-eight years in a hospital pharmacy learning to notice when a symptom does not fit the story it has been given.She finds the banned drug in the bottle. It takes her nine weeks, seven hundred and eighty ringgit of her own money, and two words said in a kitchen that destroy an innocent woman's life.She is right about the jamu. She is right about all of it. And it has nothing whatever to do with what killed him.Because nothing was added to that man. The answer was in the pot, and in a tablet he had taken safely for six years, and in fourteen years of a family that never once said the important thing out loud.For readers who love Vivien Chien's Noodle Shop Mysteries, Jesse Q. Sutanto's Vera Wong, and Ovidia Yu's Aunty Lee. What you get in every Madam Mariam Kee mystery - A Malaysian hawker centre, cooked properly - congee before dawn, a rempah fried out the long way, and thirty stallholders who have known each other for thirty years - A sleuth with real expertise - a retired clinical pharmacist in her sixties, and a poisoning that is medically accurate and completely fair play - A middle-aged woman who solves it by noticing, not by chasing anybody down an alley - A clean, gentle read - no gore, no profanity, no cruelty on the page - Two authentic recipes, a pharmacology note explaining exactly how it was done, and a Malaysian English glossary - Every book stands alone - start here if you like, then go back. Set in the hawker stalls of Petaling Jaya and the flats of Kampung Pandan, where justice does not always arrive in the back of a police car - and sometimes arrives in an accounts book at the bottom of a cupboard.Pull up a stool. The congee is ready.