Mingled With Venom (Mrs. Bradley Series 54)
Gladys MitchellGamaliel also arrests the attention of Dame Beatrice Bradley, who is staying at a nearby hotel. It is from the future boxer that the Home Office consultant learns of an outbreak of shoving--one targeting Romula Leydon, a second directed at her daughter Diana--that, if successful, would have dispatched its recipients over a cliff. This is soon eclipsed by a fateful Sunday luncheon wherein a pot of horseradish sauce mixed with the root of wolfsbane (or monkshood) makes its way to the table. The only casualty is Romula Leydon, most likely by design: it was known that only the matriarch ever used the sauce, and that a pot was made fresh each week by her faithful cook, Mrs. Plack. A recently dismissed kitchenmaid is arrested, charged with substituting the lethal sauce as a means of revenge. But no one--Dame Beatrice and the not-quite-grieving family included--can believe the simple girl capable of such an act. So Dame B. sets out to clear a kitchenmaid's name and, in so doing, shake the murderer from the family tree.