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 scandalised 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 retelling 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.