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Tea, Tonic, and Toxin is a book club and podcast for people who love mysteries, thrillers, introspection, and good conversation. Each month, your hosts, Sarah Harrison and Carolyn Daughters, will discuss a game-changing mystery or thriller from the 19th and 20th centuries. Together, we’ll see firsthand how the genre evolved.

Along the way, we’ll entertain ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges, along with the occasional guest. And we hope to entertain you, dear friend. We want you to experience the joys of reading some of the best mysteries and thrillers ever written.

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Thanks to our Sponsor! gracesigma.com: Consultancy specializing in lean process improvement, continuous improvement, Six Sigma, systems design, metric development, data storytelling, and data visualization.

Meet our guest:
Mike Nugent has worked as a lawyer, lobbyist, litigator and business executive in the
technology, intellectual property and financial services fields, and has always worked at being a writer. He has self-published three political mystery novels and has a fourth about to be submitted. He has self-published a children’s book and has had several short stories published in various journals in the US and abroad, one of which he’s turned into a short screenplay. One of his books was a Writers &  Readers Magazine’s Authorlink! Featured Thriller for two straight months and another made it to the semifinalist round in the 2015 James Jones First Novel Fellowship contest, meaning it was selected in the top 30 of over 675 submissions.
Mike’s work can be found at amazon.com/author/pmnugent.
https://www.facebook.com/pmnudge
Mike is a member of Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop in Denver, Colorado where he completed a 2-year Book Project program on writing novels led by 2023 Edgar Award winner Erika Krouse. He lives near the Jersey Shore.

THAT ENDING: Spade tried to turn the thugs against each other - In the end, Spade sees right through Brigid. Like the Op, nothing escapes his attention. How do you interpret Spade’s actions in the final scene? 

THE FLITCRAFT PARABLE: Is the search for meaning futile in our chaotic, unpredictable, morally ambiguous world? Here’s the story Spade tells Brigid. Back in 1922, a man named Flitcraft left his real estate office in Tacoma and never returned. In 1927, Mrs. Flitcraft came to the detective agency where Spade was then working, claiming someone had seen a man in Spokane that looked like her husband. Spade checked it out, and sure enough the man was Flitcraft. Going by the name Charles Pierce, Flitcraft had a car business, a wife, and a baby son. Flitcraft explained to Spade that one day he was walking down the sidewalk when a beam fell from a construction site and almost killed him. Though he wasn’t seriously injured, the incident made him realize that we can die at random at any time. “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.” He decided to change his own life at random by simply disappearing. After drifting around the country for several years, he settled in Spokane and got married. Spade is fascinated by the fact that Flitcraft’s new life wasn’t that different from his previous life.

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