The Passion and the Poison

THE PASSION AND THE POISON The year is 1868, the scene a squalid little house in the Lincolnshire village of Stickney. And what exactly happened on that early autumn evening when Richard Biggadike came to die in the most dreadful agony from a massive dose of arsenic? Protesting her innocence to the end, his young wife Priscilla would go to the gallows for the crime, but as many aver to this day, she was indeed innocent, and that the killer was in fact one of the lodgers who shared the single bedroom with the couple and who, we are told, later confessed to his crime. Now, over a hundred and fifty years later, Bernard Taylor, past winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award, has provided an answer to the questions, the mystery, in an absorbing account which will take his readers on paths hitherto untrodden in the case. PRAISE FOR THE PASSION AND THE POISON "Was Priscilla Biggadike unjustly convicted and hanged for poisoning her husband in their overcrowded two-roomed house in Lincolnshire? This masterfully constructed and immaculately researched book addresses and ultimately answers the question, and it is much more, showing how the hardships of the 'underclass' in mid-Victorian England almost made murder a lesser evil. A fine book." PETER LOVESEY, author of the Sergeant Cribb mysteries and many other best-selling novels. "A masterful and compelling analysis of this controversial case." LINDA STRATMANN, author of the Frances Doughty mysteries. "Taylor is a master." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.