Sweet Poison

Death comes to dinner at the Duke of Mersham's, and so does a confidant of the new German chancellor Adolf Hitler, in this ingeniously crafted mystery novel set against the background of Anglo-German relations in the summer of 1935. Among the other guests at the duke's influential table are a pacifist bishop, a womanizing politician, a Canadian press lord and his troublesome daughter, and one of the duke's oldest friends-a man vehemently opposed to any accommodation on the part of the English to Hitler's regime-General Sir Alistair Craig VC. It is over the duke's excellent port that death strikes first, when the general may have mistaken a cyanide pill for his medication. The mystery behind the general's unanticipated death intrigues and challenges both Lord Edward Corinth, the duke's younger brother, and Verity Brown, a resourceful young journalist who has come to interview the duchess supposedly for Country Life but in reality for the communist Daily Worker.