Well, with one of his books anyway, so you have to excuse the radio silence today, I blame it all on Robinson. I have been reading his book “Before The Poison“, a total burn the midnight oil pageturner, and I have kept 150 pages or so for tomorrow, like a good wine that you have to give some time to breathe. It’s a marvellous novel. It doesn’t feature the now iconic Inspector Banks, but it’s still located in Yorkshire, and it’s a superb whodunit, 5 people in a snowed-in mansion in the Yorkshire Dales one January in 1953, a man dies after enjoying a dinner with his wife and friends, and for 2 days the protagonists are trapped with no connection to the outer world with a dead body inside the house, and the story begins with one of the 5, the 40-year old beautiful wife of the deceased older landlord, being hanged for his murder.
60 years later, an Oscar-winning sound composer buys the house where the murder was committed, and he starts looking into the trial of Grace Fox, and discovers that things are not as they seemed.
There have been lots of crime fiction novels that have had their stories based on murders committed decades ago, the most well known recent example would have to be “The girl with the Dragon tattoo” by Stieg Larsson. There is also marvellous so-called true crime that deals with long forgotten crimes, the best of all in my view being Kate Summerscale’s “The Suspicions of Mister Witcher“, a fantastic whodunit and one I consider to be one of the best and most gripping reads ever.
But this Robinson novel is fantastic, and I can’t wait to finish it tomorrow. Go get the book folks.
