Book Review: Promotions and Poisons

Title: Promotions and Poisons

Author: L.C. Turner

Quote: "Susan would argue with me just for the sake of arguing, evne if she didn't actually disagree iwht me."

Nobody much liked Susan Smith. (Even her author didn't like her. Turner had to know she was naming this character after one of the more loathsome female murderers of all time.)  The question is who felt desperate enough to murder her. Narrator Presley (that's a female given name now) and her superficially collegial competitors are all suspects and hence motivated to find out which of them did the deed. 

It's a very simple cozy mystery so it may not matter, but one detail rang glaringly false to me. A character asks another character, suspiciously, "How did you know that oleander is poisonous?" Child. When I was a wee tot, every two-year-old in California was close enough to an ornamental oleander to have the flower pointed out to us and to be told, "If you ever have to touch that, wash your hands right away. Just the amount of sap that might get on your hands could be enough to kill you." The suspicious character would be the one who might be asked, "You say you didn't know that oleander is poisonous?"

Maybe it's different for the young...