The clandestine love affair and scandalous murder trial of Madeleine Hamilton-Smith shocked Victorian society. Now the events are reimagined in a brilliant debut novel from playwright, Katherine Tozer, coming January 2027.

A novel of love, murder, scandal and revenge, The Art of Poison is for fans of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, as well as readers of historical fiction by Sarah Perry, Stacey Halls and Tracy Chevalier.

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.

Find out more about The Art of Poison here,