A father seems to be doing his best to send his son to the gallows. A doctor turns detective decades before the role exists while a drunken policeman loses vital evidence in a pub.
This unlikely narrative marked the birth of modern forensic
science. In the early 19th century white arsenic – tasteless and
deadly in tiny doses – was the near-perfect murder weapon. So when
in 1836 James Marsh came up with a reliable test for the poison,
its career as a killer was surely at an end. But then a series of
shocking errors suggested it was sending innocent men and women to
the scaffold.
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"A nice, nasty murder story"
The New Yorker
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"A fascinating account of some of the most gruesome and mysterious murders"
P.D. James