Novels with dual timelines where the protagonist in the present timeline is trying to solve a mystery from the past timeline are like catnip to me. When I read the synopsis for The Lost Apothecary, I thought, yes, this is going to be good. And the reviews that I read for it were all very positive. But unfortunately, I ended up being disappointed by this novel. It has the potential to be a good novel, but it seems like the author was in a rush to tell the story and sacrificed a richer plot and stronger character development. There are other authors who tell this type of story much better, such as Kate Morton, Eve Chase and Susanna Kearsley (although her novels have a supernatural slant).

The events in The Lost Apothecary are compressed into two or three days in both the past and present timelines. The present timeline is about a 34-year-old American woman named Caroline who has travelled to London, England alone for her tenth wedding anniversary because she has just found out that her husband is cheating on her. She has an interest in history, which she has not been able to nurture as she gave up dreams of grad school to marry her husband fresh out of college and start a family. Ten years later, she still does not have kids and she is at loose ends, and not just because she found out husband is a cheat.

In London, she joins a mudlarking expedition on a whim and finds a little blue bottle with a bear etched on it buried in the Thames river mud. The bottle looks old, so this sends her on a quest to discover where the bottle came from. Now, fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, but even I had a hard time accepting that Caroline, who has no formal training as a historian or archeologist, was able to discover the identity of the Apothecary Murderer, who lived centuries ago, in a matter of a couple of days. But I guess a plucky American is the only one who can find the Apothecary Murderer’s shop somehow magically untouched in the middle London since 1791.

Caroline’s story includes her cheating husband showing up in London in order to pull off a ridiculous stunt to make her realize that she can’t live without him. This whole subplot is intended to force a connection between the present and past timelines but made me feel like I had somehow ended up reading a very bad soap opera. I think maybe Caroline’s story would have been better if there had been more character development and a deeper look into her backstory. Like, how did she end up marrying her husband in the first place?? He is a repulsive character.

The past timeline is more interesting, but it has its own issues. It is about the mysterious owner of an apothecary shop, Nella, who dispenses poisons to women who want to get rid of the bad men in their lives. Nella’s own mind has been poisoned by the betrayal of the man she loved and who she thought loved her in return, and she had a hand in his untimely death. I will not say that he did not deserve it, but it is kind of hard to root for someone who assists people with killing other people and seems to have no qualms about it. She even says at one point she will not dispense a poison to a woman so that she can kill another woman, but then admits that she does not know if her customers are not doing that anyways, and it’s like, oh well, nothing I can do about it.

Nella keeps a ledger where she records the names of all the victims, the poisons she dispensed to kill to them, and the names of the women who came to her for the poisons. The reader is pretty much bludgeoned over the head with the importance of this ledger as a record of all these women who would otherwise not be remembered in the annals of history. I totally get it; I think about this too, all the people in the world who have lived and died, and who remembers them? What kind of mark have they left on the world? What kind of mark will I leave on this world? (This blog, I guess?) I also realize that in the 18^th century women had no recourse against the men who abused them (and that women today still seem to have little recourse against their abusers). But I would not want my legacy to be a record in Nella’s ledger as the victim of an abusive man and as his murderer.

Nella’s story intersects with that of twelve-year-old Eliza, who goes to Nella’s shop to pick up a poison for her mistress that will be used to kill her mistress’ husband, who has been starting to get handsy with Eliza. I think we are supposed to feel sorry for Eliza because she is so precocious and ignorant, especially about how her own body works (she ends up getting her first period the very day that her mistress’ husband is poisoned and has no idea what is happening; she thinks the husband’s spirit has got inside her body and is making her bleed. Yet somehow none of the adult women in her life think to explain the menses to her). But Eliza does not struggle at all with her conscience after having a hand in someone’s death and she even wants to apprentice to Nella in her apothecary shop. Maybe some people deserve to die, but if we do not feel troubled at all by their death or for wishing that they were dead, does that really make us better than them? I think the author should have put more effort into developing Nella and Eliza’s morality throughout the novel, instead of waiting until the very end like a deathbed confessor begging a priest for absolution. There is so much promise in The Lost Apothecary, but in my opinion this novel fall shorts of being profound.