Jim Nesbitt's Guest Post Review: The Poison Dart by Geri Dreiling

  

Please welcome back author Jim Nesbitt back to the blog today with his latest guest post review …

 

The main character in Geri Dreiling's second mystery novel, The Poison Dart, isn't a cop or a shamus so she doesn't carry a badge or a gun.

 

But Debbie Bradley, an investigative reporter, uses some of the same sly, dogged, bold, deceitful and sometimes illegal tricks a detective routinely pulls out of their hat.

 

Her lies are smooth and sweet. Her trespassing skills are stealthy and cat-burglar quick. Her stake-out chops are tenacious and iron-bottom sound. And she's a master at chasing the social media breadcrumbs that show the connects between the subjects of her stories.

 

Best of all, she takes the reader on a fast-paced ride-along as she shuffles through her tradecraft tricks to discover the next tendril of an ever-more-dangerous web of rich-kid heroin addicts, sleazy roadside deadbeats, redneck money mules, cartel killers and a Mexican family shackled to a network of ruthless drug traffickers.

 

Bradley, known as Crime Beat Girl for her underworld stories in a slick city magazine and the accompanying podcast that gives her a certain measure of fame, also takes readers on a tour d'horizon of St. Louis and its satellite towns.

 

It's a place where the top two questions everybody asks a stranger are: Where did you go to high school? And, which parish do you belong to? Yeah, it's a clannish town more than it is a city, very much focused on its storied past rather than its threadbare present, and the author takes the perfect snapshots that show its insular folkways.

 

There's a great riff on a St. Louis institution, the Wednesday lunch at St. Raymond's, the Maronite church just south of downtown that serves as the spiritual home for the city's Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. It's still a place where deals are made and pols, cops, mobsters and just plain folks rub elbows.

 

One of Bradley's regular podcast guests is a retired cop still known as Captain Jack Flannery, a renown raconteur who gives listeners -- and readers -- a fast, colorful summary of the mob wars of the early 1980s between the Mafia, the Syrian faction and a crew with connections to The Outfit in Chicago. More than a few tit-for-tat car bombings.

 

But this is a sideshow to the book's main event -- Bradley's initial intent to do a story about rich kids hooked on heroin, centering on the overdose death of a teen named Caleb Webb, the son of prominent real estate developers and twin brother to Connor.

 

This leads Bradley to Macie Holloway, Caleb's semi-girlfriend who blames herself for his death because she believes the source of his last heroin hit was someone she touted. Macie has the gaunt, doom-struck look of heroin addict deeply depressed about Caleb's death and his constant, spectral presence as a ghost whispering in her ear.

While Bradley is worming her way into Macie's confidence, a big drugs-and-money raid takes place out in the boonies west of St. Louis. At first, this seems like an event only tangentially related to Caleb's death.

 

But as Bradley pulls at the tendrils of this web, it becomes apparent that there's a direct connection between Caleb's death and the cartel that got stung by the raid and the murderous boss who runs it, El Duro.

 

Every tendril is another step in harm's way. But Bradley is relentless, locked on the trail of a suddenly far bigger story, refusing to back down, jazzed by the thrill of the hunt. After all, she's the Crime Beat Girl, a nickname she lives up to in this terrific novel by Geri Dreiling.

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4akwzSn 

 

 

Jim Nesbitt ©2026

 

Jim Nesbitt is the award-winning author of five hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers that feature battered but dogged Dallas PI Ed Earl Burch. The fifth Ed Earl Burch novel, THE FATAL SAVING GRACE, has just been released. Nesbitt was a journalist for more than 30 years, serving as a reporter, editor and roving national correspondent for newspapers and wire services in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. He now lives in Athens, Alabama, where he is writing his sixth Ed Earl Burch novel, THE PERFECT TRAIN WRECK.