Arsenic for Tea

During the Easter holiday of 1935, Hazel joins Daisy’s family at Fallingford for Daisy’s birthday. The house is crowded with relatives, servants and guests whose polished manners conceal arguments about money, marriage and loyalty. When an unpopular visitor becomes violently ill after tea and the evidence points to poison, storms cut the household off from immediate police assistance and turn the celebration into a country-house investigation.

Daisy’s usual command is unsettled because the suspects are people she loves or depends upon, while Hazel sees family tensions that her friend has learned to treat as normal. The mystery uses the servants’ knowledge, the physical organisation of the house and the pressures facing an aristocratic family to expose how privilege can hide vulnerability. Solving the case requires the Detective Society to separate affection from evidence without destroying the trust on which their partnership depends.