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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

‘METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED … A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP’ JANICE HALLETT, THE SUNDAY TIMES

‘IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING’ DAVID KYNASTON

‘A PAGE-TURNER’ ROBERT LACEY

‘CAREFUL AND COMPELLING’ KATE MORGAN

‘YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING’ MARC MULHOLLAND

‘A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL’ SEAN O’CONNOR

A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.

On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England.

Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England.

Armstrong’s story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers.

With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer?

One hundred years after the execution, Agatha-Award shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

Publisher Review

Immersive and compelling, The Poisonous Solicitor works at every level: as human drama, as an evocative slice of social and legal history, above all as a lucid and dispassionate presenting of the evidence about a century-old puzzle. -- David Kynaston Stephen Bates puts us in the middle of an extraordinary trial for murder, when one life and many reputations were at stake. It was gripping then and fascinating now, with a shocking sting in the tale. You will read it in one sitting. -- Marc Mulholland, author of The Murderer of Warren Street Marital disharmony, spare arsenic in the house, a premature death, the suspicions of nosey neighbours - all leading to the judge putting on the 'Black Cap'. Have you ever imagined you might find yourself sitting in judgement over a murder trial? Stephen Bates' gripping narrative takes you right inside one of the classic court cases of the 20th century. His page-turner lays out all the evidence for you to examine, so you feel you are actually up there on the bench - presiding over the dramatic trial of the only solicitor ever to be hanged in England. Guilty or innocent? You decide . . . -- Robert Lacey, bestselling historian and biographer Part Agatha Christie, part social history, Stephen Bates has stripped one of the classic 20th-century murders of a hundred years of conjecture and supposition, revealing a dark and troubling parable of inter-war rural Britain, a suffocating world of professional rivalries, rigid social codes and deadly small-town gossip - where poisoned chocolates are delivered by first class post. Finding nuance and ambiguity in what has often been viewed as a black-and-white case,The Poisonous Solicitor is a real-life golden age crime novel with a tragic heart and an unexpectedly poignant denouement. -- Sean O'Connor, author of Handsome Brute and The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury A careful and compelling reconstruction of one of the most infamous murder trials of the twentieth century. Stephen Bates excels at contrasting the claustrophobia of small-town life with the grisly details which make the story still so notorious, a century on. -- Kate Morgan, author of Murder: The Biography