Pick your Poison, by Catriona

There are a limited number of ways to kill someone. How do you keep from repeating them? Or do you not worry about that at all?

Well, I didn't worry about it. I will now. Seriously, it's not something I've ever considered, but for this blog I thought I'd review murder methods in the books I've written. I'm not goin to illustrate this post with book jackets, for obvious reasons. I went with cats.

Rachel doesn't really read crime fiction

Okay then, in joint fifth place with one entry each, there's:

• burned to death in a fire
• clumped over the head with a blunt instrument
• aspirated emesis (it's maybe murder, if you roll a drunk onto their back and leave them)
• shot 
• boiled 

She makes exceptions

In joint fourth place, turning up twice, there's:

• pushed from a height
• dismembered
• poisoned

In third place, having been used three times, quite surprisngly because it's slow and horrible, we have:

• starvation 

She hates mystery conventions

Runners up, with four outings in my oeuvre, are:

• stabbed
• drowned

What can I say? I like kitchen equipment and I come from a small island with a lot of sea. 

But I think I also like people not getting murdered, because a whopping eight times, making it the outright winner,  is:

• no murder at all!

Someone might have died but maybe no one got offed. Or maybe no one even died. Cool. Fine by me.  Although one of the books this happened in is the one my husband calls "the concept album", what a bookseller called "the one where nothin happened", of which a reviewer said "if nothing's going to happen, you should find that out sooner than p.160". (I still like it.) 

It's a miracle I ever write anything

Anyway, none of that is necessarily true because as I was writing out book titles and jotting down causes of death, another category emerged. There were eight instances of:

• can't remember

Maybe twelve people have drowned in my books (small island). Maybe there have been eleven gun deaths (not likely). Pretty sure there's ony been one boiling, but I wouldn't swear to it.

Cx