
Beautiful, vivacious Rosemary Barton is enjoying a glass of champagne at her birthday celebrations when she’s seen slumped across the table, not drunk but dead. Poison is the method chosen for April’s ReadChristie challenge, and Rosemary’s ‘blue cyanosed face’ points towards death by cyanide.
The novel opens a year later with the six people who were at the party reflecting on Rosemary and in particular on that horrible night. George Barton, her kind but dull husband; her sister Iris Marle who lived with Rosemary and George (and their widowed aunt, Lucilla Drake); Ruth Lessing, George’s indispensable secretary; Anthony Browne, a friend of Rosemary’s; Stephen Farringdon, an up and coming member of parliament and Alexandra, his proud professional wife.
The cause of death has been recorded as suicide, but this doesn’t seem possible for someone as happily alive as Rosemary. George has his doubts which seem to be confirmed when some anonymous notes arrive claiming she was murdered. But how could she have been, there’s no evidence that anyone around the table put the cyanide in her glass and any way who would have wanted to kill her?
Continue reading “Sparkling Cyanide”