Rat Poison: A Novella

Mississippi, August 1859. The cook poured the coffee at six-fifteen. By six-thirty she was gone, and the planter’s family was convulsing on the dining room floor.

Mary measured the arsenic the way she measured salt. She has her reasons. She does not intend to explain them to anyone — least of all to Sheriff Booker, the methodical lawman riding out from Jackson with a leather case book and a clipped magazine article on the Marsh test for arsenic in his pocket.

Booker considers himself a professional. Patient. Fair. He interviews each witness separately, in the parlor, with the door closed. He does not understand that before his horse reached the front gate, forty people on the Hartwell plantation had already picked a side.

And somewhere south of the tree line, a woman in a heavy shawl is walking — steadily, the way she does everything — toward something she will not survive losing twice.

Rat Poison is a historical novella of the antebellum South as told by the Help. Inspired by the documented history of resistance among enslaved people, it is the story of what the system could not see — and what it cost the people who saw everything.

From the bestselling author of Still Waters.