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 dramatic re-telling of one of the most notorious murder cases of the Victorian era offers an ingenious, chilling and brilliantly plausible solution to a devious killing that has baffled true crime fans for 170 years.
