Before the Poison audiobook

A long-time expat buys a large house in his native Yorkshire following the death of his wife. The plan is to compose a classical piece of music (as opposed to film scores that has been his livelihood) in his semi-retirement. With lots of time to spare, he finds out that the house was the location of great drama in the early 50's. The man in the house died and days later it was deduced he was poisoned, something he wife was later convicted of. But was she guilty? Our composer-cum-amateur detective starts his own investigation and gets further than he though he would.Very mellow-paced and low-key, my thoughts went to Robert Goddard (for the 'historical mystery'), rather than Inspector Banks. But I came to like the story a great deal more than I thought I would. Thinking about the next read left me strangely uninspired and I felt a reading slump creeping up on me, which is all the more evidence for the captivating quality of this story that it kept me interested and reading anyway. Being a Banks aficionado I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy a totally different story by Robinson.

Diverting his attention from the popular and successful Inspector Banks series, the author has written a murder mystery of a different genre. Instead of a police procedural, he has undertaken to use a variety of literary devices to unravel the truth behind a death that took place sixty years ago.It begins when Chris Lowndes, reeling from the death of his wife, decides to buy a home on the Yorkshire Dales. He purchases Kilnsgate House, a large, bleak, isolated structure in which he hopes to recover from his depression, and, perhaps write a sonata instead of the incidental music for motion pictures which he did for many years on the West Coast of the US. No sooner does he take possession than he becomes haunted by its past: Grace Fox, the former owner, was accused and convicted of poisoning her husband, a respected local physician. And she was hanged for it.Chris becomes so obsessed that he endeavors to “discover” the truth, initially convinced that she was innocent of the charge. The author leads the reader (and Chris) from supposition to fact, alternating excerpts of Grace’s wartime diary (she was a nurse, first in Singapore, then escaping the Japanese, suffering a series of devastating experiences, finally serving in France before returning to her husband at Kilnsgate House) and various interviews with aged characters, including her younger lover now living in Paris and a man who as a seven-year-old lived with the Foxes for a time as an evacuee at the beginning of World War II.The shifts in the plot, as Chris conducts his “investigation,” are truly ingenious, keeping the reader off balance to a fare-thee-well. The characters are well-drawn, and the author undertook deep research to create Grace’s diary. While the novel may seem at times somewhat dry and slow to read, it constantly draws the reader forward and is well worth reading, and it is highly recommended.

Just the type of story I love. A Hollywood composer comes back home to the Yorkshire dales after a personal loss and finds himself drawn into trying to find out the details of a notorious crime that was committed in the out of the way country house he purchased. A very well written character driven suspense that had me staying up late to finish.

Famous trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton MorleyGrace Elizabeth Fox rose from her bed and dressed with the aid of her young Attending Officer Mary Swann at 6.30 AM on the morning of 23 April, 1953. She ate a light breakfast of toast, marmalade and tea, then she busied herself writing letters to her family and friends. After a small brandy to steady her nerves shortly before 8.00 AM, she spent the following hour alone with the Chaplain. So starts Before the Poison the tale of a fictional murder trial in 1950s England as seen through the eyes of Chris Lowndes a composer for films, who has returned to his native Yorkshire after decades living in the US. Recently bereaved he buys the remote Kilnsgate House unseen as somewhere to compose music and to recover from the loss of his beloved wife Laura.It doesn’t take Chris long to discover that Kilnsgate House was the scene of a murder some fifty plus years before. On 1 January 1953 Dr Ernest Fox and his younger wife Grace, aged forty, were entertaining two old friends, waited on by their maid Hetty Larkin. The fire was roaring and despite rationing the menu comprised of roast beef, mashed potatoes, roast parsnips and Brussel sprouts followed by that very English desert rhubarb pie and custard. Outside the snow began falling and it didn’t stop, the party was going nowhere and the guest bedroom was made up for Jeremy and Alice Lambert. That night Ernest died and the remaining four inhabitants waited with his body two days until the police and the mortuary van could get to the house. With what he gleans from Grace’s life and learning that his brother was at school, next door to the prison when Grace was hanged, her life and perhaps more importantly the question of her guilt, or innocence, becomes something of an obsession.With my love of historical crime, this fictionalised account of a murder trial in the 1950s hit just the right note with the details about the key players really coming alive, it was hard to believe that all this was fictional perhaps because the author had clearly done his research so the details were spot on with key references such as Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous of hangmen, adding hooks to hang the case on. With our protagonist being a composer the numerous references to music are completely in sync with the story unfolding and provide a gentrified backdrop to a story that delves into the past to a time where perception was everything. Fictional this may be, but Peter Robinson makes good points about why a woman may be suspected of murder, particularly if it was thought that the woman didn’t hold the highest of morals.The story is of Chris in 2010 researching the crime, the details of the murder and the trial are presented in excerpts from the book, Greatest Trials and later on some diary excerpts that give further context to the key player’s life. This made for tantalising reading with the details forming a natural part of the story-telling, a clever device that allowed Chris’s narrative to focus on his next step in his discovery.I haven’t read any of the Inspector Banks books but if they are anywhere near as absorbing as I found Before the Poison to be, I need to check them out sooner rather than later.

This novel is rich in depth but also replete with detail and requires a chunk of time for concentrated reading. A good snowstorm comes to mind first, but I did not have that. Peter Robinson has shown himself to be a person interested in music in his Inspector Banks series, and here he is allowed the freedom to paint the pages with a variety of musical references. The main character has done well writing musical scores for Hollywood and has set out on a new path he hopes will allow him to write music that might be listened to. He returns to his home country, buying a large and isolated house in the Yorkshire Dales. He wants to know the history of the house after seeing a reflection in a mirror of a woman. Well, who wouldn't? He soon becomes obsessed with discovering why the former owner of the house died under suspicious circumstances that led to the hanging of his beautiful wife. This investigation takes him on many interesting journeys. As part of the history of this woman, a journal is uncovered detailing the horrors of her war service as a nurse including biological weapon use.

Re-read this book, and have nothing more to say beyond my original review, still a very good read.Read January 2012, re-read August 2017Not a Banks mystery, something different but wonderful.Peter Robinson shows how versatile his writing can be, but has many constants from his Bank's series to keep readers comfortable. Constant with the hero Chris Lowndes and Inspector Banks are their love of many types of music, movies, and curiousity of why people behave the way they do.Each chapter is divided into two parts. During the first half of the book the first part was a historical record of Grace Fox's trial in the 1950's, the second part modern life of Chris Lowndes. During the second half of the book the first part is the journal of Grace Fox from her time as a nurse in the Pacific between 1940-45, the second part continues to be modern life of Chris Lowndes. During the first half of the book, I found myself wanting to get through the record of the trial, impatient to get to the modern part of the chapter. Once it changed to Grace's journal I flipped my preference from the modern to the historic, disappointed sometimes in the brevity of the descriptions although they fit perfectly as a journal entry, but I greedily wanted more. I loved the ambiguities, one cannot expect to have a perfectly clear picture of an event when 60 years have passed.

I’m not much of a mystery reader, but if I do read a mystery I tend to avoid series writers as they often tend to be formulaic. So when an honored mystery writer comes along with a standalone I am more apt to give it a try. In the case of Peter Robinson’s latest Before the Poison I’m glad I took the chance. Best known for his Inspector Banks novels Robinson is indeed a celebrated novelist, and Before the Poison is sure to win him new admirers. Chris Lowndes has spent twenty-five years in the States, most of them composing musical scores in Hollywood, but after the death of his wife he decides to return to Yorkshire. Buying a house, Kilnsgate, virtually sight unseen, upon his arrival he senses he has not been told the full story about the house. Chris quickly learns that a previous owner, Ernest Fox had been murdered in the house, and his young wife Grace stood trial and was executed in 1953 for the crime. Chris becomes almost obsessed with finding out more about the incident and begins to compulsively seek answers to the many questions that remain. The more he uncovers the more he’s convinced Grace was innocent. Despite warnings to leave the past in the past Chris begins to uncover secrets, some of which lie too close to the present. Filled with likable and unforgettable characters and encompassing everything from War time secrets to lost love, Before the Poison is a gripping read.

Am rămas impresionată de acest roman care, din păcate, nu e deloc promovat. Îl recomand cu drag și sper să ajungă în rafturile a cât mai mulți cititori.Povestea merge pe două planuri temporale. Prezentul prezintă drama unui om intelectual, cult, care, ajuns la vârsta de 60 de ani, trece printr-o depresie puternică și încearcă să-și găsească un nou rost în viață, după ce o pierde pe Laura, soția lui. Rostul și-l găsește în încercarea de a descoperi adevărul legat de condamnarea lui Grace Fox, o femeie acuzată că și-ar fi otrăvit soțul. De aici pornesc multe intrigi. Autorul a inserat și jurnalul lui Grace, precum și rezumatul procesului prin care aceasta a trecut. Restul poveștii îl aflăm din spusele martorilor și din evenimentele puse cap la cap de Chris. Grace mi-a amintit de Malena, un alt personaj feminin puternic, care a fost judecată în mod nedrept, doar din cauza prejudecăților vremii. Grace a fost o femeie frumoasă, puternică și bună la suflet. Din păcate, cred că tocmai asta i-a adus sfârșitul. Anii petrecuți de ea ca infirmieră și ororile la care a asistat în vremea celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial au marcat-o și au declanșat practic un șir de evenimente ce au scăpat de sub control. Recunosc că finalul m-a surprins și, chiar dacă romanul nu a fost unul perfect (sunt câteva faze trase de păr), m-a convins să îi acord cele cinci steluțe.

LOved this book! So well written. Peter Robinson also writes the DCI Banks mysteries, but this book is a stand alone. A successful music writer for Hollywood movies decides to move back to his native Yorkshire, England. He buys an old country estate, & the mystery begins. The writing is so descriptive you can see the country, & the home. Main character is so very charming. This is an intelligent story, but has suspense too. A hanging occured many years ago by charge of the court, & the owner of the estate wants to find out if the lady was guilty of murder or not? Did she kill her husband? The quest is liken to a travel log, but more interesting, as all the places we go to interview folks who knew the lady hanged, a former owner of the estate. Loved it all, & highly reccomend to anyone likeing mystery, but a bit above the usual story!

After the death of his beloved wife Laura, Oscar-winning score writer Chris Lowndes returns to his native Yorkshire to wait for his wounds to heal. He buys, sight unseen, a rambling house in the remote wilds of Yorkshire, and settles in with his books, his music and his DVD collection. Soon, though, he becomes fascinated by the story of the Foxes, who lived in the house half a century ago. Ernest Fox was a cold, unpopular but highly respected general practitioner; when he died unexpectedly, his beautiful and much younger wife Grace was accused of murdering him by poison and in due course hanged. As Chris becomes increasingly obsessed by the case -- more accurately, by Grace -- he realizes that there was far more to the story than was ever made public . . .This is one of those books that could have been written to half the length but, had it been so, wouldn't have been nearly so good. Chris, who narrates in the first person, is a bit of a whiner, a bit OCD, a bit self-absorbed. We learn what beers he likes to drink during his frequent trips to the pub, what novels he reads, the movies he watches (plenty of good UK noirish offerings), and the music he plays, whether it be classical (mostly) or jazz/rock (occasionally). He has excellent tastes in all these areas (and I was wondering throughout if, in terms of the latter, the novel was named for Marianne Faithful's 2003 album Before the Poison), but the particularization might seem a tad excessive. So might the pedestrian cadences, and the mundane pomposity, of Chris's prose. Here's a sample:I realized that Christmas was fast approaching, and my guests would be arriving soon. I still had presents to buy. The rest was done -- tree, lights, tinsel, decorations, turkey -- and I was expecting a large delivery of Champagne and other fine wines within the next couple of days. But there remained the dreaded Christmas shopping. The weather forecast called for a major snowstorm within the next twenty-four hours, so taking advantage of the first clear day since I'd driven to see Louise in Staithes, I decided to head for York and get it over and done with. [page 270]If you read this in isolation you might think that Chris is the most awful bore -- "the dreaded Christmas shopping" and "[t]he weather forecast called for" -- and in real life he might very well seem so. But, assuming we're prepared to sit back and let him tell his story at the rate he chooses, his narration very soon becomes mesmerizing. To be sure, we really don't need to know that the pint he drank in the pub while waiting for a friend to appear was Stag's Breath rather than generic bitter, but it's part and parcel of the man that he should tell us. The overall effect is that we enter his world, start to see things through his eyes.Robinson also introduces quite lengthy excerpts from two different documents. One is the supposed Famous Trials account of the case -- where he captures the unctuous smugness of that series' authors quite perfectly -- and the other is Grace's own journal of her wartime experiences as a nurse in the Pacific theater, being bombed by the Japs and treated as vermin by far too many of the Brits. I'm not too sure Robinson catches Grace's voice quite as well as he does that of Famous Trials's Sir Charles Hamilton Morley, but the events described in her journal pack as much of a punch as do those in Robbie's account of the lead-up to Dunkirk in Ian McEwan's Atonement. What the extracts also do, if we're alert enough to pick up on it (I wasn't), is explain Grace's behavior around the time of her husband's death.Grace, we find early on, had a lover very much younger than she was: Sam. It's easy to understand why she should have entered the relationship with Sam (although the discovery of it was probably the main reason that she was hanged): tied to an aloof husband who'd come nowhere near her since the birth of their child/his heir, she wasn't so much taking a younger lover as erasing twenty wasted years so she could, as it were, start over again -- so she could at last have the romance that time had stolen from her. As Chris discovers, the toyboy lover -- now an old man -- still worships Grace and the love they shared.While that relationship seems just fine to me, I've far greater reservations about that the one that develops in the present between the sixty-year-old Chris and the gorgeous, eye-turning late-thirties Heather, the realtor who sold him the house. They first meet each other wshen she shows him around his blind purchase, and even then the sparks are flying. By the end of the book they're an item, although yet to acknowledge themselves as such to the locals. Yes, I'm sure such liaisons happen (I've seen some, and seen at least one very happy marriage result from one); but I get immensely uneasy about sixty-year-old writers depicting sixty-year-old males at whom fab younger babes can't help but throw themselves. It all smacks a bit of the kind of fantasy we were supposed to give up in our teens.I think the book would have been better had Robinson omitted the Chris/Heather relationship; perhaps the intent was to mirror the Grace/Sam relationship. If so, I'm not sure it works. But it's just about the only thing that, for me, didn't work in Before the Poison. Otherwise, this is a wonderful Ruth Rendellish piece, with lots to recommend it.

Before the Poison was a book chosen to be read for my mystery book club and is the first book that I have read by Robinson. I have to say that I really enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down. Most of the story takes place in England, but the main character does do some traveling in his search for the truth about whether or not Grace Fox murdered her husband. Robinson did such an amazing job with his world building that I could really picture these places and especially Kilnsgate. Robinson also delivered an interesting and compelling main character in Chris as well as made Grace a compelling character as well even though she dies on page one. The story is filled with many twists and turns which made it a great mystery. Overall this was a great read that I would most definitely recommend. I am also looking forward to reading more books by Robinson.

Though this book was somewhat slow moving and not a book I would label as hard to put down, nevertheless it was chillingly real and beautiful. As I read, I, I kept thinking it reminded me of another book. I finally figured that book was Rebecca. I know Rebecca is a favorite of many and a majority would not agree, but for me it fit. It just made me feel like I felt with reading that book; finding a why and a what happened in the past with an enigma. This book will stay with me for some time. The only reason I did not give this book a 5 is the romance between the real estate agent and the hero of this story was somewhat far fetched.

Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of discovering the Gothic Romances that were most popular from the 1960’s to 1980’s. These books, I soon discovered, were recognizable by their distinctive covers which almost always featured a night scene of a young woman frantically dashing away from the dark shadowed mansion, manor house or castle that has only a single room lit. The young woman is usually barefoot, wearing only a nightgown. In my opinion, these covers are exquisite works of art, one of my favorites being the cover of Kay Ashby’s “Cold Chill of Coptos” which is adorned by a superb painting by Walter Popp. Among the best remembered novelists of this genre are Victoria Holt (Eleanor Burford), Phyllis A. Whitney and Dorothy Eden, and two of my personal favorites, Genevieve St. John for “The Secret of Kensington Manor” and Florence Hurd for “Terror at Seacliff Pines.” These stories typically feature a young single woman who finds herself alone in the world after losing a parent or some other life changing event has occurred that separates them from any meaningful link to the community she is living in. Then an opportunity arises that at first glance seems to afford her the chance to escape her lonely, forlorn existences and embark on an adventure as a governess, nurse, caregiver, companion, or even in one case I read, a bookkeeper. Her new quasi family, or in some cases, employer, requires these services, which bring the young woman to the family mansion, manor house or castle that is foreboding and always has a name. The young woman then meets the strange occupants of the household and later those in the neighborhood, and she quickly learns that what she thought would be an amazing adventure was going to be something much more sinister and dangerous. And aside from the exquisite hand painted covers of these books, the other thing I love about them is the story aspect featuring what I can only describe as a “humanized” relationship between the newly arrived young woman and the residence she now calls her home. She will sometimes feel as though the house is staring at her, or hiding from her, sometimes she feels its disapproval, or wrath and sometimes she believes its actually whispered to her. The amazing authors I mentioned above, (and a host of others) do this very well! It was this “humanization” of the interactions that Chris Lowdens has with his newly purchased home, Kilnsgate House, that immediately attracted me. It felt reminiscent of all those “heroine and her house” scenes that I enjoyed so much about those vintage Gothic Romances. Here were just a few examples: In the opening pages…“I had a curious sensation that the shy, half-hidden house was waiting for me, that it had been waiting for some time. I gave a little shudder, then I turned off the engine and sat for a moment, breathing in the sweet air and luxuriating in the silence.”About midway through the story…“It was well after dark by the time the taxi pulled up outside Kilnsgate House, which was waiting for me, like a neglected lover, with a mingled mood of sadness and anger.” And near the end…“Kilnsgate House was waiting for me like an old friend when I got out of the taxi I’d taken from Darlington railway station.”All these little moments I savored, sometimes even putting the book down to imagine how Chris might be feeling as he approaches the house each time, and under the auspices of the different moods that he was experiencing, associated with the house.And for me, these clearly stated interactions between man and his new home were the catalyst for further accrediting Chris’s other experiences inside the house, some of which would be less relatable to the reader, now made more authentic and in keeping with the general mysterious mood of the story. Enjoyed this one, my first Peter Robinson book. I suspect it won’t be my last.

I love Peter Robinson’s writing - this is full of music ( classical this time not the eclectic DCI Banks collection ) , food and drink ( much in pubs and restaurants but some home cooked specials ) of location ( North Yorkshire ) wonderful rural scenery ( with added detail and history eg Lime kilns) of weather ( usually cold , snowy , inclement) of our hero’s travels to nearby towns and far flung cities… This is not a Banks investigation in fact it doesn’t involve the police at all - but it is an investigation. Of sorts- our hero a writer of film music, recently moved to near Richmond after the death of his wife, becomes obsessed with the story of a former owner of the house he has bought - Grace Fox - a lady who was hanged in 1953 for murdering her husband. The narrative is both contemporary and historical. The contemporary tells of our hero’s adventures as he settles in - gets unsettled - and sets on a mission to prove Grace’s innocence. For no purpose …. The historical is in two forms- firstly an account of her trial and secondly the detail from her war time career ad a QA nurse working overseas. This is horrifying and starts to touch in germ warfare and Porton Down (scientific centre in uk for germ warfare experimentation ) and this leads us back to the main plot. It is a really excellent, fast read. Loved it.