Customer Reviews

The Poison Tree

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I read Strong's second novel The Death Pit before I started The Poison Tree and I really liked it. And I'll admit that at first I liked this one as well.

I read it with interest right up until the big climactic scene when the whole plot fell apart. The solution made very little sense to me- it almost seemed as though the author had just tacked it on at the last minute to have an ending- any ending! That leads to a thoroughly disgusting and nauseating spate of animal cruelty that I find unforgivable. The author seems to be hoping that these atrocities will make the reader forget that the so-called solution to his mystery was ludicrous and wholly unbelievable. It didn't work- I was so furious by the end that I vowed never to read anything else by Mr. Strong. That's unfortunate because as I stated before, I did like The Death Pit. Makes me wish that I'd never looked for The Poison Tree.

The plot line of this book had such potential, which is what kept me reading past the first few chapters. I very much identified, however, with the main character's students, who were falling asleep during her lectures.

The grotesque and the sexually explicit does not bother me very much when I am reading a good book. This was not a good book. It was oh-so-obvious that this was written by a man, and one who really doesn't know women at that.

The most unnecessary part of the whole book was the epilogue. It added nothing to the storyline and leaves the reader with only negative feelings towards the book as a whole.

This is less mystery than thriller, and it's not very thrilling. I found the characters neither interesting nor likeable, and prefer criminals to have some motivation other than psychosis. One book jacket blurb says something like "the classic English mystery meets the American thriller;" if so, the classic English mystery is badly beaten and raped in the encounter. Even the sexual relations seem to lack plausibility. I think that Tony Strong relies a little too much on brutality against a cat and various people, and too much on the coarse titilation of fantasy sex letters, instead of creating convincing motivation.

One of the characters in Tony Strong's The Poison Tree states that, "The dectective novel has become the crime thriller, pandering to the public's taste for the grotesque...a living literary form is dead...Who killed the detective novel? We did." I couldn't agree more and wish Strong had kept to this line of thought when writing his book. He is obviously not an unintelligent writer; a shame he settled for the cheap shots. The violence is exactly what we have come to know and deplore in recent years. The sex is at times uninteresting, at times repellent and too locker-room to be tolerated in such high doses. It is obvious this was all to be considered central to the plot, but it became a tiresome turn-off.

Writers such as Deane Koontz have already brought us every imaginable form of cruel human depravity. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone started in with grotesqueries having to do with animals. At one point we get a cat devouring the afterbirth and one of its offspring. The book ends with the protagonist's neighbor drowning kittens to feed to their carnivorous mother. I rest my case.

The various strands of plot in 'The Poison Tree' are cleverly intertwined to force you to keep turning the pages til the end. Terry, the main character, is a league more interesting (and believable) than your average thriller heroine. As the rollercoaster story twists and turns, so do the emotions of the characters. As in Balzac, everyone is flawed, but this 'comedie humaine' has at least one very nasty character darkening the tale. Packed with symbolism and reference, the narrative is compelling - how refreshing for the reader never to be treated like an idiot. 'The Poison Tree' would make a very fine film indeed.

I guess our book club missed the point of more famous reviewers - was it a noir thriller? Was the sex absurd to the point of laughable? We searched for a cohesive plot, struggled to make sense of the heroine (why did you have a lesbian relationship? why did you launch into a straight affair?), wondered if every second page truly required violent or unhappy sex, and swore we would do much better research before selecting a book. The book would have been so much better if the author had concentrated on the characters and the plot, instead of filling it with sexual psycho-babble -- a British mystery professor, what a great vehicle that could be. Don't buy this book.

I thought this book was awful - the main character showed a lot of promise initially but degenerated into an irrational, obnoxious stalker and there were no other characters in the book who were at all likeable. The main character's relationship with the police and her access to confidential police files were improbable at best. The author telegraphed the identity of the killer but had the main character so side-tracked by her obsessions that she couldn't figure it out. (personally, when I'm reading a mystery I want to be the one who gets side-tracked - I spent the second half of the book wanting to shake the main character and say "It's ____, you idiot) The ending felt like it was tacked on. Finally the book was full of gratuitous and ultimately not very interesting sex scenes. Subplots about Penthouse Forum-type letters and the main character's sexuality seem to have been thrown in for the sole purpose of giving the author a chance to include as many different people in as many different positions as possible. Overall very disappointing!

I read this book slightly out of turn (his second book 'The Death Pit' has the same main character) so I went into it already having an affection for the main character. Nonetheless, this book begins on an eerie note with a great murder, and leaves the reader suspended, constantly guessing and turning the pages. I think the characters are extremely well developed, and the book is paced very well. I never got ahead of the story in regards to figuring out whodunnit, which is rare. Tony Strong is a great author, and I recommend all his books. His last two are just coming out now in the states (I bought them in Canada because I couldnt wait to read them) and they are also both fantastic. I can't recommend his work enough.
His storytelling gives new life to the tired old mystery.

This is a meticulously researched thriller/whodunnit. Strong punctuates the plot with an astonishing amount of detail about sexual deviancy, rampant feminism, student excesses, cruelty to animals and autopsies! The characters are vividly animated and the whole plot, including the clever twist in the denouement, seems scarily plausible. Furthermore, being familiar with the locations described (Oxford and its environs) made this book feel more "real" to me than many an Americal novel I've read. So why not 5 stars then? Probably because I feel little empathy with any of the characters. OK so whilst the heroine's tenacity elicits a grudging admiration, she is intellectually appaullingly arrogant, exploitative of those who love her and has a huge feminist chip on her shoulder to boot. Her neighbours are thouroughly immoral and creepy, and the students are a bunch of hoorah-henrys. Terry is no latter-day Miss Marple! Oh, and if you're fond of cats, you will probably find this book rather upsetting - did we really need that epilogue Tony? So, an extremely well written and memorable book, but I can't honestly say I enjoyed it a great deal!

Unlike the previous reviewer, I loved this book. Admittedly, the sex and violence are pretty strong stuff - the heroine, Terry, seems to spend as much time working out whether she's gay or straight as she does investigating the murder. But for me, her sexual ambivalence was nicely integrated into the plot, which ultimately turns out to be about sexual desires as well. It's also brilliantly written. Images leap out at you - on the first page "a light rain makes the street lights soft and hazy as dandelion clocks"; a page or two later the killer, having done the deed (with a soldering iron!) describes how "my head rolls slowly into the basket of my hands". But what really makes it is the central conceit: the heroine is a lecturer in detective fiction, and her lectures provide a weird & thought-provoking context for the murder she's investigating in real life.

That said, there are times when the book irritates. It can't quite decide if it wants to be a serious literary psychodrama or a raunchy page-turning thriller. There probably is too much sex, and I found the frequent use of humour rather grating in what is otherwise a rather dark, gothic book. It might become a cult novel - certainly everyone I've loaned it to has had a strong reaction to it one way or another. I also rather liked the heroine. She's arrogant & aggressive, but next to her a lot of other mystery protagonists look insipid and bland.