Holy shit. Listen, publishers. When you have a talent like Laura Purcell in your stable, a writer who is willing to stuff sticks of dynamite into the reader’s face, and then light the fuse and giddily run away, you don’t softly softly sell her worth. When I received the advance uncorrected proofs of Laura Purcell’s THE POISON THREAD, I read the three lame review quotes and the uninspired back cover description and thought, “This doesn’t speak to me.”

And then I read the first 25 pages and I sat back twice, stopped reading to begin this review, and then just kept diving back into the book over and over to see what Purcell would say next. This is her fourth book (the most recent being THE SILENT COMPANIONS) but I want many, many more from this truly talented author.

She shares the tale of Ruth and Dorothea. Ruth is a criminal, a young lady who has been bullied and abused all her life and is now in prison because she has killed her former mistress. Fair enough. Dorothea is the upper class goody-two-shoes who is trying to do well but is so very un-self-aware that it can be painfully funny. Purcell writes chapters using the point of view of these characters, and somehow manages to write realistically from both of these standpoints.

Let me give two examples. I know reviewers are never supposed to quote from advance copies, but this is important (and the rule is stupid). Here’s Ruth, the lower-class murderess from page 12: “You can live your life through a piece of sewing; that’s what people don’t realise. You can ply your needle with any emotion in the human heart and the thread will absorb it. You can sew with tenderness, you can stitch yourself from panic to calm, you can sew with hate.” That is beautifully intense, raw, honest, powerful.

And then from Dorothea (in a totally different context): “The relief I felt to see that figure, running full pelt after the hateful beast who had snatched my reticule.” (p. 28) It’s a silly sentence, so stilted and Victorian in its style, and yet it is perfectly matched to Dorothea’s character.

The chapters bounce from one extremely well-written style to another and explain both of the main characters very well. You can’t imagine how hard this is to do, and Purcell pulls this off seamlessly.

Slowly, we begin to get Ruth’s back story. How her mother was a seamstress and she learned to sew from her mother. But her mother is in debt to a dressmaker named Mrs. Metyard and in order to avoid debtor’s prison, Metyard takes on Ruth as an apprentice. It’s a trick. Mrs. Metyard is a monster, an abuser, a torturer, and Ruth suffers greatly at the hands of Metyard and Metyard’s daughter, Kate. This is where Ruth gets the notion that she can sew with hate, that she can create garments infused with her own hatred, garments that will end up killing the people who wear them with the poison in the threads.

Dorothea also has a foolish notion: that the avocation of phrenology (the study of bumps on the head and how they may dictate behavior) is a real science. As a woman of charity, she visits Ruth in prison and tries out her phrenological theories on the prisoner’s head. Eventually, these two women will be disabused of both their notions.

And that’s as far as I’ll go in the recap. There is much more in this dense, meaty book. Romances, plots, secretive whispers, nefarious doings, all the type of things one loves in a quality Victorian Gothic mystery. That’s what THE POISON THREAD is, quality throughout and recommended. —Mark Rose

Get it at Amazon.