Love and Other Poisons by Lesley McDowell

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I wasn’t sure whether to read this new novel by Lesley McDowell as I didn’t get on very well with her last one, Clairmont. Although I liked her writing, I struggled with the structure, the way it would jump from one timeline to another and the lack of context to explain characters’ backgrounds and relationships. I like to give authors a second chance, though, and this book, based on a true crime, did sound intriguing…

In 1857, Madeleine Smith is put on trial in Glasgow for the murder of her lover, Emile L’Angelier. After listening to witnesses and examining the evidence, the jury, still unable to decide whether she is guilty, give a verdict of ‘Not Proven’ and Madeleine is set free. Seventy years later, Harry Townsend, an aspiring filmmaker, believes he has tracked down the woman who used to be Madeleine Smith, now living in New York as a respectable elderly widow, Mrs Sheehy. Harry wants to interview her about Emile’s murder, but when Mrs Sheehy refuses to cooperate, Harry is forced to question whether he has got the right person after all.

We move back and forth between 1857 and 1927 throughout the book, but I found it much easier to follow the plot and understand what was going on than I did with Clairmont, which was a relief! The first few sections were interesting as they set the scene and introduced the characters, but then we settled into the 1857 period and the story of Madeleine’s relationship with Emile and my attention began to waver. There’s a lot of focus on their sexual encounters, some of which are described quite explicitly (I understood why later on), and I started to get impatient waiting for the murder to happen. It does happen eventually, of course, and I was glad I stuck with the book as I found the aftermath of the murder and Madeleine’s trial much more compelling to read about.

Although I did have some sympathy for Madeleine’s position – Emile had become very manipulative and controlling, threatening her with blackmail – I never really warmed to her as a character and I felt that she could have handled the situation differently. I also didn’t like the way she implicated not just the maid Christina, who arranged meetings and passed letters between Madeleine and Emile, but also her own twelve-year-old sister, Janet. None of the other characters in the book were very likeable either; the way Harry Townsend treated the older Madeleine was horrible and I hoped he would never get to make his film! There’s a twist in that particular storyline which I hadn’t guessed, but which seems to fit well with the historical facts.

I’ve never read about the Madeleine Smith case before, although it seems to be well documented, and I wonder whether my perception of this book would have been different if I already knew some of the details before I started to read. Anyway, it was all new to me and I was fascinated by the author’s note at the end of the book where she explained the origins of the novel – the idea was suggested to her by fellow author Emma Tennant who had wanted to work on it as a joint project before her death – and how she chose to interpret some of the historical evidence. She discusses her theory regarding the murder method and weapon (this is where the strong sexual content earlier in the novel suddenly made sense), and how she tried to piece together the clues we have regarding Madeleine’s later life after the trial.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, having seen a lot of very mixed early reviews – but at the same time, I do understand some of the criticisms. Still, I found it interesting to learn about a true crime I was previously unaware of and which has inspired a large number of other novels, plays and adaptations.

Thanks to Headline/Wildfire for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 11/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie

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This was surprisingly good! Not being a big non-fiction reader or having a particular interest in reading about archaeological digs, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book and only picked it up because it’s this month’s selection for the Read Christie 2025 challenge. However, I needn’t have worried – I found it a funny, light-hearted and vibrant account of Christie’s time in the Middle East, with no long, dry descriptions of digs, and just as enjoyable to read as some of her detective novels.

Come, Tell Me How You Live was first published in 1946 under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan (her married name). The title is a play on words as a ‘Tell’ is an archaeological term for an artificial mound created by debris from generations of human occupation – therefore indicating the site of an abandoned town or city. The book describes Christie’s experiences of visiting Syria, a country rich in ancient Tells, in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan.

From the opening pages, where Christie writes about the difficulties of acquiring suitable clothing for a trip to Syria during the British winter – and the indignities of being informed that she’s O.S. (outsized) – her sense of humour shines through and continues to do so for the rest of the book. She’s prepared to poke fun at herself and Max but also brings the other people in the book to life with witty observations and amusing little anecdotes. Michel, their driver, who is obsessed with being ‘economical’, allows their truck to run out of fuel in the desert because he was curious to see how far it would last without filling up and almost buys two hundred rotten oranges at a market just because he’s negotiated a good price for them. Then there’s Mac, the solemn, silent young architect who accompanies them on the trip, who never seems to show any emotion, no matter what the occasion. I also loved the Postmaster, who constantly tries to get the Mallowans to accept any letter addressed to a random European, and the ‘professional cat’ who comes to the rescue during their stay in Amuda in a house infested by rodents and insects.

There may be some passages and attitudes that aren’t entirely acceptable to a modern reader, but Christie was writing for a 1940s audience and I think she was generally respectful of the Syrian people and their culture. With this book, she provides a lot of insight into what it was like to be an Englishwoman so far from home, in a world so different from her own. What she doesn’t provide is any detailed information on archaeology or their finds. Her focus is always on everyday life and her general impressions of the landscape, the people she meets and their customs. Even her writing is barely mentioned, although we know that she was working on novels such as Murder on the Orient Express during her time in Syria.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am grateful to the Read Christie challenge for highlighting it this month. I’ll be taking part again in August with the Poirot mystery One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

Book 10/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Mrs in the title

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is Books with Honorifics in the Title (“…an honorific is a form of address conveying esteem, courtesy or respect. These can be titles prefixing a person’s name, e.g.: Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms., Mx., Sir, Dame, Dr., Cllr, Lady, or Lord, or other titles or positions that can appear as a form of address without the person’s name, as in Mr. President, General, Captain, Father, Doctor, or Earl.”) (Submitted by Joanne @ Portobello Book Blog)

I noticed that I’ve reviewed exactly ten books with the word Mrs in the title, so decided to just stick to those for this week’s post. They are listed below:

1. The Other Side of Mrs Wood by Lucy Barker – The story of a successful medium in 19th century London who gets more than she bargained for when she takes on a new apprentice!

2. The Autobiography of Mrs Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin – A fictional memoir of the American circus performer Lavinia Warren.

3. Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen – This novel explores the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and the poet Frances Sargent Osgood.

4. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar – Set in Georgian England, this book begins with a captain selling his ship in exchange for a mermaid!

5. Mrs England by Stacey Halls – A children’s nurse takes a new position with a family in Yorkshire and quickly sense that something is not quite right.

6. The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst by Katie Lumsden – A small, quiet community in 1840s England is shaken up by the arrival of Mr Montgomery Hurst’s new wife.

7. Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea – A fictional look at the life of Lizzie Burns, common law wife of the German philosopher Friedrich Engels.

8. Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes – A collection of short stories written between 1939 and 1944 and giving some insights into Britain during the Second World War.

9. Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce – The first in the Emmy Lake series, about a young woman who becomes an advice columnist in wartime London.

10. Mrs Whistler by Matthew Plampin – A fictional account of the life of Maud Franklin, the model and muse of the artist James McNeill Whistler

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Have you read any of these? Which other books with ‘Mrs’ in the title have you read?

The Mourning Necklace by Kate Foster

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Some people become famous for their remarkable lives and others for their remarkable deaths. Maggie Dickson is one of the latter – although technically, it wasn’t really a death at all! Known as ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’, Maggie Dickson was sentenced to death in 1724 and hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. As her family gather in a nearby tavern, they are shocked to look up and see Maggie herself standing at the door. Other than a rope burn around her neck, she seems unharmed by her ordeal and determined to make the most of the second chance she’s been given. But while everyone has questions for her – how did she survive and how did it feel to be so close to death? – there’s only one question that matters now to Maggie: will they try to hang her again?

Maggie Dickson was a real person and the story of her survival is a true one, still remembered three hundred years later; Maggie Dickson’s Pub in Edinburgh is named after her and she is often featured in Edinburgh walking tours. In The Mourning Necklace, Kate Foster builds a fictional story around this amazing woman and her near-death experience, using her imagination to fill in the gaps around the historical facts.

The year before she receives her death sentence, Maggie is living with her parents and younger sister, Joan, in Fisherrow, a small fishing community in Musselburgh, Scotland. The Dickson family have made their living from fish for generations, but Maggie doesn’t see a future for herself as a fishwife and wants something different out of life. Her marriage to Patrick Spencer, a perfume trader, seems to offer the opportunities she’s looking for, but when things don’t go according to plan, she takes control of her own fate and sets out alone for London. However, she gets no further than Kelso in the Scottish Borders before she is forced to make a series of decisions that will lead her back to Edinburgh and the gallows.

I enjoyed Kate Foster’s last novel, The King’s Witches, but I thought this one was much better and I connected with Maggie Dickson in a way that I didn’t with the women in the other book. There’s also a strong cast of supporting characters, including Joan, whose actions as a sister disappoint Maggie over and over again; Mrs Rose, who betrays Maggie for reasons of her own but at the same time is one of the few people to offer her friendship; and the wicked Dr McTavish, one of the book’s villains. All of these people have key parts to play in Maggie’s story, which is divided into three sections: the events leading up to her arrest, the hanging itself, and the path her life follows after she escapes death.

Maggie’s crime is something that will surprise a lot of modern readers as, although she unknowingly broke the laws of the time, today we wouldn’t really consider her to have committed a crime at all (at least not if Kate Foster’s interpretation is close to the truth). At first I assumed that as the death sentence was usually given as ‘hanged by the neck until dead’, it would be decided that Maggie had not served the sentence and would be hanged again. However, it wasn’t as straightforward as that because it seems that the sentence at that time was simply ‘hanged by the neck’ and the additional words were added later to avoid ambiguity in cases like hers.

This is a fascinating novel, with some great descriptions of 18th century Musselburgh, Edinburgh and Kelso. We also learn a little bit about the tea smuggling which was widespread down the east coast of Scotland and England due to high taxes on imported tea. I loved it and must find time to go back and read Kate Foster’s first book, The Maiden.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan/Mantle for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Six in Six: The 2025 Edition

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Six in Six was the idea of Jo, who used to blog at The Book Jotter and was something I joined in with every July, as I thought it was a good way to look back on the first six months of the year. We would choose six categories (Jo provided a list of suggestions but participants could come up with new topics of their own if they preferred) and then try to fit six books or authors we’d read from January-June into each category.

Although Jo is no longer blogging, some of us still wanted to take part in this and so far I’ve seen posts at In Another Era and Hopewell’s Public Library of Life. My attempt is below – some of the books could have fit more than one category, but I only wanted to use each book once.

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Six books set in countries other than my own

The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Italy/Vatican)
Strange Pictures by Uketsu (Japan)
The Rush by Beth Lewis (Canada)
Clear by Carys Davies (Scotland)
The Sirens by Emilia Hart (Australia)
Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton (Netherlands)

Six books with a bird or animal in the title

The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis
Secrets of the Bees by Jane Johnson
The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham
We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida

Six novels with a touch of fantasy or the supernatural

The Morrigan by Kim Curran
The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay
Jennie by Paul Gallico
The Darkening Globe by Naomi Kelsey
The Secrets of the Rose by Nicola Cornick

Six books with a mystery to solve

Tea on Sunday by Lettice Cooper
Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz
The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson
Traitor’s Legacy by SJ Parris
A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor
A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Six books about real people

The Queen and the Countess by Anne O’Brien (Margaret of Anjou/Countess of Warwick)
Britain’s Greatest Private Detective by Nell Darby (Henry Slater)
Cleopatra by Natasha Solomons (Cleopatra)
The Cardinal by Alison Weir (Cardinal Wolsey)
That Dark Spring by Susannah Stapleton (Olive Branson)
Love, Sex & Frankenstein by Caroline Lea (Mary Shelley)

Six books I’ve read but still need to review:

The Portrait Artist by Dani Heywood-Lonsdale
The Greek House by Dinah Jefferies
The Game is Murder by Hazell Ward
A Case of Life and Limb by Sally Smith
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
White Corridor by Christopher Fowler

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What do you think of my six sixes? Have you read any of these books? Did you enjoy your reading in the first six months of the year?

The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

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I’ve enjoyed all of Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s previous books, particularly The Square of Sevens, so this is one of the new releases I’ve been most looking forward to reading this year. It has many of the same elements as her others – an 18th century setting, a mystery to be solved, lots of surprising plot twists and characters who are not quite as they seem! This one also features ice cream, which makes it a perfect summer read.

The Art of a Lie opens in London in 1749 and the first section is narrated by Hannah Cole, whose husband Jonas was found dead in the street several months earlier, seemingly the victim of a robbery. Since his death, Hannah has continued running their business, a confectionery shop known as the Punchbowl and Pineapple, but is struggling financially. A visit from the magistrate, Henry Fielding – who is also the author of the recently published Tom Jones – brings her some welcome news: Jonas had a large sum of money in his bank account that she knew nothing about. Unfortunately, her excitement is short-lived because Fielding also tells her that he suspects the money was acquired illicitly and that Jonas was probably not just the victim of a random attack as first thought, but was murdered by someone he knew.

A second way of improving her financial position soon presents itself to Hannah when a gentleman enters the Punchbowl and Pineapple and introduces himself as William Devereux, a friend of her late husband’s. William gives Hannah a recipe for ‘iced cream’, a frozen dessert made by his mother, who was raised in Italy. Despite some initial problems – freezing cream without the aid of an electric freezer is not an easy task – the new treat proves a big success. And soon William is helping her to solve a bigger problem – the question of who killed Jonas Cole and where the money in his bank came from.

The perspective switches between Hannah and William several times throughout the novel, with each narrator being given a distinctive narrative voice of their own. I felt a stronger connection with Hannah, but seeing things from William’s point of view provides a whole different side to the story. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that neither one of them is being completely honest with the other (or with anyone else) and that, as the title suggests, this really is a novel about the art of telling lies! It was fascinating to follow both of their narratives, wondering who was going to come out on top. The ending of the book wasn’t really what I’d expected and although I would have preferred the ending I had expected, it was good to be taken by surprise!

I loved the setting of the book, particularly the descriptions of Hannah’s shop and all the cakes, chocolates and sweets she sells. I enjoyed reading about her experiments with different varieties of ice cream (don’t miss the author’s note at the end of the book, which has some factual information about the history of ice cream in the UK). The inclusion of Henry Fielding as a character in the book was also interesting – he really was Chief Magistrate of Westminster at the time the story is set and was the founder of the Bow Street Runners, London’s first police force.

The Square of Sevens is still my favourite Laura Shepherd-Robinson book, but I think it’s just a matter of personal taste and I’m sure some readers will like this one better. It reminded me very much of The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay and I think if you enjoyed that one you’ll probably enjoy this one as well.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan/Mantle for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 9/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White

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Originally published as Some Must Watch in 1933, this is a reissue by Pushkin Vertigo under the title The Spiral Staircase – the name of the 1946 film adaptation. I’ve previously read two other novels by Ethel Lina White – The Wheel Spins and Fear Stalks the Village – and enjoyed both, although I found the former slightly disappointing in comparison with Alfred Hitchock’s wonderful The Lady Vanishes, which is based on it. This book has turned out to be my favourite of the three!

Almost the entire novel is set within the walls of the Summit, a lonely country house near the Welsh/English border. Adding to the sense of tension and claustrophobia, the main events of the story also take place over the course of a single evening. As the novel opens, we learn that four murders have recently been committed – the first two in the nearest town, which is over twenty miles away, the next slightly closer, and the fourth in another country house just five miles from the Summit. All four victims were young women and their deaths are on Helen Capel’s mind as she returns to the Summit after her afternoon off and is convinced that she sees a man hiding behind a tree in the dark.

Helen has just started a new job as ‘help’ to the Warren family – Miss Warren and her brother, known as the Professor, and their elderly, bedridden stepmother, Lady Warren. At the start of the novel, the Professor’s son and his wife are staying at the house, as is a student of the Professor’s, Stephen Rice. The rest of the household is made up of two more domestic servants, Mr and Mrs Oates, and the newly arrived Nurse Barker, who has been employed to look after Lady Warren.

When news of another murder, closer than ever this time, reaches the family, the Professor orders that all the doors are locked and everyone stays inside until morning. These should be easy enough instructions to follow, yet for a variety of reasons, one person after another leaves the house or becomes otherwise incapacitated. As a storm rages outside and the tension builds inside, Helen is forced to confront the idea that one of the remaining people in the house could be the murderer.

This book is good fun, but you do need to be able to suspend disbelief now and then (Helen is one of those heroines typical of this genre of book, who, despite knowing there’s a murderer on the loose, tries to open the front door every time someone knocks and spends most of the night wandering around the house on her own, along dark passageways and up and down dimly-lit staircases). Still, Ethel Lina White does a great job of creating an atmosphere of foreboding and fear, not just through stormy weather and shadows, but also through hints that various characters may not be as they seem. Is Lady Warren really unable to walk – and why does she have a gun in her room? And what if Nurse Barker isn’t really a nurse?

I found this a quick, entertaining read, let down slightly by the ending because the killer’s identity wasn’t particularly surprising and their motive was unconvincing. If you’re looking for a cleverly plotted mystery, I think you’ll be disappointed as I would describe this as much more of a psychological horror/suspense novel than a crime novel. It reminded me a lot of Benighted by J.B. Priestley and I think if you enjoyed one there’s a good chance you would enjoy the other. After finishing this book, I watched the film for the first time (it’s currently available on YouTube) and while it’s worth watching in its own right, I didn’t feel that it had much in common with the book!

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 8/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.