My main interest in this little volume was the section on Madame la Marquise de Brinvilliers, with whom I’ve been fascinated by for several years.

Sadly, this account didn’t meet my expectations. Little info is added to Hugh Stokes’s more in-depth account on Madame published in 1922. While Stokes quotes recorded dialogue, giving his work a more active narrative, Plaidy seldom does the same. Instead, most quotes are put into reported speech, which creates very passive prose.

More to the point, though, much of the narrative – including in the other two sections – is speculation. For example:

“Perhaps she would be told: Poor so-and-so died last night. She would show great sympathy and ask after the manner of dying.”

Following on from the above quote, the author goes on to speculate how Madame might ask to see the body, and describes what the morgue might’ve looked like, and so on. Personally, based on all I’ve previously read about Madame, I find it most unlikely that she’d ask to see the bodies of her victims.

My point is, though, that the author speculates too much in all three sections. The basis of this work is the author’s opinions. She feels that Madame never loved anyone but herself. I disagree. I think Madame put herself first, but if you read more in-depth accounts, you’ll see that she cared – if not deeply loved – her eldest son, and to a lesser extent her eldest daughter.

During Madame's final hours, she more than once talked about her husband to her confessor (Edme Pirot, who’s left a detailed written account of their conversations). Plaidy touches on this in reference to Pirot remarking on Madame’s husband not visiting her in prison, arguing that Madame makes excuses for him because it’s an insult to her vanity to suggest he would otherwise be there to see her. What Plaidy doesn’t mention, however, is that on her slow ride to the scaffold, Madame speaks affectionately to Pirot about her husband, when at such a time nobody completely selfish would do. Therefore, I’m again irritated by the author’s bias, which is based on incomplete/overlooked research.

I think part of the author’s reason for painting Madame in this light was to compare her to the other two poisoners featured in the book. In other words, she wanted to stress that although all three lived in different times and countries, they were essentially the same. I agree to an extent, but it’s not as black and white as that.

As for the other two poisoners, I admit to having never previously heard of Edward Pritchard. His story, set in nineteenth-century Scotland, is slow and in the most part tedious. This may be owing to the way it’s written. Again, we have a lot of reported speech and speculation. A more thorough account by a different author might’ve appealed to me more.

Cesare Borgia is arguably the most well-known of the three poisoners, though I’m not as familiar or as interested with his history as I am with Madame de Brinvilliers. He’s without doubt one of the evillest men to ever walk the earth. As is often the case, though, a sinner’s story makes for more interesting reading than that of a saint’s.

Borgia’s section features the most engaging narrative owing to more facts being known about him than the other poisoners. Therefore, we get less speculation.

Overall, this feels like the novelist that Plaidy/Carr/Holt was decided to have a go at writing three biographies in one as a whim. Like with many of her novels, she’s taken on a lot of different stories and crammed them into one volume, when three separate editions with more in-depth coverage of each personage would’ve been a better option (in theory). ( )