A pharmacological error on page 94
I have been a hospital pharmacist in Miskolc for twenty-two years and I read medical thrillers for recreational purposes, and I want to register, as a professional, that the pharmacology in most of them is wrong. Not subtly wrong. Wrong in ways that anyone who has dispensed medication for a week would notice. I started writing my own medical thriller in 2019 partly out of frustration and partly because I had a plot idea that none of the books I'd read had explored. The premise involves a pharmacist, not a doctor, who notices a pattern in dispensing records that suggests something deliberate, and whose professional knowledge becomes the investigative tool. The detective's advantage is not forensic training but pharmaceutical expertise, which is specific and strange and mine to give her. I live near the Avas neighbourhood and I write in the evenings after the hospital day, and on weekends. The technical accuracy of the drug-related scenes is probably excessive by commercial standards but it matters to me. I've sent the first three chapters to a reader in Budapest who works in crime fiction publishing and she said the premise was strong and the pacing needed help. I'm working on the pacing.