IN HIS fictional recreations of Victorian crimes Joseph Shearing has never written a more absorbing novel than this story of the life of the heroine of one of France's most celebrated murder trials. This romantic, neurotic girl, who possessed noble ancestors but little dowry, was wed through the intervention of a marriage broker to an "iron master” whose grim and sinister chateau and unprofitable iron works lay in one of the wildest sections of France. No bride, even in the eighteen thirties, could have been more difficult or more indomitable than this frail and elegant young woman.

When he died in agony, and Marie Lafarge was accused of giving him arsenic, and was condemned to life imprisonment, the French upper class was literally torn asunder. Was this pale lady, brought up in convents, chateaux and elegant Parisian boudoirs, one of the most unfortunate victims of malice and injustice of the century, or was she a murderess at heart and her whole life a tissue of lies and, if that were true, did she herself believe the fantasies in which she mind was steeped?

Published in England in 1937, this is the first appearance in America of the most ambitious work of this master of melodrama.

This special edition of THE LADY AND THE ARSENIC by Joseph Shearing has been made available to the Armed Forces of the United States through an arrangement with the original Publisher, Smith & Durrell, Inc., New York.

Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., a non-profit organization established by the Council on Books in Wartime