Before the poison : [a novel] / Peter Robinson

Subtitle from jacket.

Through the years of success in Hollywood composing music for the world's most lauded films, Chris always promised his wife they would return to the Yorkshire Dales one day. Now, after his wife's death, Chris feels he must not forget his promise. Back in the Dales, he buys Kilnsgate House, an old mansion deep in the country that will allow him the space to come to terms with his grief and the quiet to allow him to compose his piano sonata. He then learns that the house was the scene of a murder in the 1950s. The former owner, a prominent doctor named Ernest Arthur Fox, was allegedly poisoned by his beautiful and much younger wife Grace, and that she, the convicted murderer was one of the last women hanged in England. He finds himself increasingly distracted by the events of sixty years ago, and sets out to discover what really happened.