The Art of Poison

‘It’s riveting. Everything is so expertly woven and layered – It’s so damned right and strong and resonant. I shall continue thinking on the entire Madeleine Smith affair for a long while…’ Phyllis Nagy, Oscar nominated screenwriter of Carol

The clandestine love affair and scandalous murder trial of Madeleine Hamilton-Smith shocked Victorian society. Now the events are reimagined in this brilliant debut novel – with a startling new theory as to what might really have happened...

Glasgow, 1855. When handsome Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a marauding Jerseyman with a passion for ferns, sets his cap at twenty-year-old debutante Madeleine Hamilton Smith, it’s not the first time he’s had ideas above his station. For Madeleine, bored and wayward, he is an exciting distraction, and they embark on a clandestine affair. But Emile treacherously hoards her letters and when she throws him over for a more eligible suitor, he threatens to send them to her father.

When Emile is found dead of arsenic poisoning, Madeleine is arrested, her explicit correspondence exposed at a trial that scandalized Victorian society. But was she a victim of her class, gender, and the expectations of women? And what if someone else had a motive for murder and revenge...?

Based upon meticulous research, this is a dramatic re-telling of one of the most notorious murder cases of the Victorian era.