They love not poison.

In an unusual departure, Sara Woods takes her latest suspense novel back in time to 1947, when Antony Maitland, recently discharged from the service, is reading law at the farm of a friend in Yorkshire. But the anticipated pastoral quietude is blemished by four seemingly disparate occurrances--the growth of gossip concerning the revival of local witchcraft, rumors of a treasure of gold plate hidden and then lost during the seventeenth-century Civil War, suspicions of lucrative black market activity in the vicinity, and the death of a woman from arsenic poisoning on a nearby farm. Weaving these incidents together against the rustic background of the Yorkshire countryside in what certainly must be Antony Maitland's first big case, Miss Woods tells a fascinating and entertaining story that will surely please her many fans.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.