A friend of mine is writing a book. In it she wants her villainess to kill her 'competition' by injecting her with snake venom. So she came and asked me what the likely outcome would be at post mortum...

I haven't a clue!

However, what did strike me is that perhaps, as an added degree of ingenuity, her vallainess could use some bizarre RF ven for the job. There's been some pretty impressive claims over the potencies of say, Boiga or Psammophine venoms of recent. Now, they tend not to do too much damage when they bite you due to small wet yields, crap delivery etc... However, suppose a substantial dose was collected from several snakes over several milkings and this was injected by syringe I assume the consequences could be pretty catastrophic.

Still doesn't help with creating a beleivable outcome though. I assume that snake venom would certainly be found in the cadavers system. But what kind of degree of identification could be deduced? And if they can't deduce the species involved would they put 2and2 together and look at the villainesses snakes...? Or would they just be disregarded as 'harmless'. I know that you'll mostly be Americans who read this, and that your legal system would behave differently, but it would be nice to get some ball park ideas nonetheless.

As the book is set in the UK the RF approach seemed nice as most of these are legal (if somewhat hard to come by) whereas 'propper' hots aren't.

I think she's going with the injected in the belly-button idea for delivery (is it true or an old wives tail that this wouldn't be noticed - assuming there was no localised reaction to give it away). Or would something like the scalp be better (hair to mask injection, close proximity to brain requiring a lower dose...).

Anyway, any thoughts or ideas on this would be welcome.

Regards, Lee.

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