As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I pivoted back to my longer series to get my writing muscles back in fit condition. I’ve been working on the story since that time and it’s time for a cover reveal.
Poisonous Death is book 15 in the Jill Quint, MD Forensic Pathologist series. It’s available now for pre-order by clicking here. The release date is October 30, 2024. Yeah! I can’t tell you how good it feels to write instead of feeling bad about neglecting my readers and my writing skills every day.
So what’s the story about? Jill gets a call from a woman (Catherine Dubois) in the nearby city of San Jose. It seems that her best friend and neighbor (Mary Niles) was found dead that morning in her home. Given that the friend was 85, no one is looking beyond natural causes. Jill decides to take on the case as the investigation will just take about two hours beyond her home and she knows that Catherine will be unable to convince her local medical examiner to do an autopsy. Afterall, didn’t Mary die from natural causes?
Yesterday I was doing research into the autopsy findings of older people. Yeah, I research weird and gruesome stuff for my stories, but I admit I was also curious. There was a study performed in Austria in 2005 that investigated the death of centenarians over an 18-year period. It turns out there were 40 of them (29 women and 11 men) with an average age of 102. Wow! Sixty percent of them were reported to be in good health prior to their death. The question in the study was—did they die of ‘old age’? What kind of diagnosis is that? What the study concluded was they died from ‘organ failure’, most often the heart. Still, it was interesting reading. I had always thought that 4am was the death hour, but for this age group, 7-9am was the highest mortality time period. I’ll work more details into the story as Jill performs her autopsy on Mary. Don’t worry, there won’t be gory details.
Cheers,
Alec
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