Book Review of “Poisoned Pen” by Anthea Cohen

Blurb

Genre – Suspense / Victorian Era

A small community is shaken by the consequences of anonymous poison pen letters which spread scandal and prejudice in the village of Shalbourne.

My Review Rating – 5 Stars

Everyone has secrets – mostly harmless but some harmful secrets. Some secrets are hearsay and need not be true. But some hearsay can also be true, as there is rarely any smoke without fire. But whether the secret is harmful or harmless, truth or hearsay, all secrets do affect everyone directly, indirectly involved or involved through medium of being a messenger. All in all, no matter how close knit a village is or how well the villages know each other, the true face of a person is rarely known even to those who live with them everyday.

The above paragraph sums up the entire book. This is one of those very few Victorian set up suspense story which engages the reader and gives a beautiful pictorial representation of the set up along with a wonderful psychological play of characters. The story is not a mystery as the mystery writer’s identity is given out in the initial few chapters itself. It is much more

However, the story delves more on how the lives of all the people in a village are interlinked and how one person’s activity can affect and completely the change the lives of their fellow villagers. The human interactions and emotions are intrinsically woven into a beautiful interconnected web. Every tug of a thread in the web disrupts and creates a wave which can make or break the web, so much as to invoke murderous tendencies.

Anthea has created a delicate masterpiece with this story. The way a person thinks in perspective to self and their surrounding gives a delightful insight to the working of small pocket villages where everyone knows everyone and their relatives. How people manipulate their circumstances to create a favorable image of themselves in the society and how far are they willing to go to maintain this image is the crux of the story. It is truly a master writing and a delightful read. Nothing short of 5 stars.

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