Toxicology, which opens with the tragic death of Romeo Byron, one of Hollywood's hottest young actors, centers on two women who are neighbors in Manhattan's West Village. Mimi Smith, a filmmaker whose only screen credit is a notorious low-budget slasher movie, finds herself in desperate need of resuscitation for both her career and her downwardly spiraling life. Her neighbor, Eleanor Delacroix, is a legendary, scandalous literary figure, now nearing eighty and addicted to cocaine and alcohol.
Their personal and artistic lives begin to converge in unexpected ways as Eleanor grieves over the recent death of her longtime lover, the painter Yvonne Wilder, and as Mimi confronts the challenges presented by the mysterious disappearance of her drug-dealing boyfriend, Bobby; by her newly sober if still somewhat loopy brother, Carmelo; and by her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter, Violet. Looming over this canvas of unforgettable characters is the ghost of Agnes--an "illegal" and cousin of Mimi's who might have been murdered by her New Jersey employers.
Their personal and artistic lives begin to converge in unexpected ways as Eleanor grieves over the recent death of her longtime lover, the painter Yvonne Wilder, and as Mimi confronts the challenges presented by the mysterious disappearance of her drug-dealing boyfriend, Bobby; by her newly sober if still somewhat loopy brother, Carmelo; and by her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter, Violet. Looming over this canvas of unforgettable characters is the ghost of Agnes--an "illegal" and cousin of Mimi's who might have been murdered by her New Jersey employers.