I thought ‘The Botanist’ had topped it all in the Washington Poe universe, but ‘The Mercy Chair’ somehow manages to raise the bar even higher. This series gets better and better and not boring at all. Chapeau! To keep readers hooked, M. W. Craven plays around with non-linear narrational structure in this book and it works brilliantly. It didn’t feel experimentally at all. The story development is no walk in the park…not for the reader and certainly not for Poe as the main character. The darkest Poe novel yet is nothing for the faint-hearted! What began as a solid police procedural has now evolved into a full-blown thriller series, rich with psychological depth and quite graphical depiction of human abysses. In contrast to this, what was hinted at the closing chapters of the previous book has now come to pass: We get to know a whole new, more vulnerable side of the gruff Cumbrian detective. I enjoyed this character development, but missed Tilly a bit in this book.