Poisonous Solicitor

<p><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION</b><br><b><br>'METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED ... A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP' JANICE HALLETT <i>THE SUNDAY TIMES</i></b><br><b><br>'IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING' DAVID KYNASTON</b> <p/><b>'A PAGE-TURNER' ROBERT LACEY</b> <p/><b>'CAREFUL AND COMPELLING' KATE MORGAN</b> <p/><b>'YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING' MARC MULHOLLAND</b> <p/><b>'A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL' SEAN O'CONNOR</b><br><b> <p/><i>A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.</i></b> <p/>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. <p/>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. <p/>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. <p/>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? <p/>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.</p>