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BEFORE THE POISON
by Peter Robinson
McClelland & Stewart, October 2011
448 pages
$29.99 CAD
ISBN: 0771076223


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Years ago, Chris Lowndes left Yorkshire and ended up in Hollywood where he enjoyed a successful career as a composer of film scores, "the music no one listens to". Now recently widowed and still deeply grieving, he has come to the Dales, bought a large and isolated country estate, and plans to settle in and finally write some music he hopes people will listen to.

The house he buys was something of a bargain and before long, he learns why. It had once been owned by one Dr Fox, who died suddenly more than fifty years ago. His wife, Grace, was convicted of poisoning him, becoming one of the last women to be hanged in Britain.

Perhaps because his feelings are still raw following his wife's death, perhaps because he is possibly ever so slightly fey, Chris gradually becomes obsessed with the case. He reads up on it in "Famous English Trials," excerpts from which head up the early chapters of the novel and which reflect the gloriously urbane tone of some of the original accounts of murders in the real Notable British Trials. He tracks down the young man, now well advanced in years, with whom Grace had been conducting a passionate affair. It was this affair that convicted her in a case where actual evidence was very slender. He even flies off to South Africa to interview someone he believes might shed some light on what indeed happened so long ago. He invents one scenario after another to explain why Grace was wrongfully convicted, only to have each crumble on closer examination.

As so much time has passed, it is not surprising that firm evidence of Grace's guilt or innocence is hard to come by. The best witness for her is the one who was not called at the original trial - Grace herself. Through the medium of a diary she kept during her war service as a Queen Alexandra's nurse, an extraordinary woman emerges, but one who experienced many of the horrors of the Japanese conquest of Singapore, followed by a tour of duty in Europe following the Normandy invasion. Could such a woman possibly have cold-bloodedly murdered her husband, unpleasant though he clearly was? Well, maybe, depending on how she coped with the psychological aftermath of such a war.

The tragedy that was Grace Fox's life was, in the end, more the product of a particular historical moment than of personal failing, Though very far from a suspense-driven thriller, the well-drawn characters, both living and dead, and the skilful evocation of a past that, though only a little more than half a century gone, seems as far from the present age as Queen Victoria's day, provide for an absorbing read.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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