The Poison Tree
See Review by Andrew Taylor
See Review by Val McDermid
In the wake of a failed marriage and a misguided love affair, feisty academic Terry Williams moves to Oxford to resume her abandoned doctorate in detective fiction. But her new home, a terraced house on quiet Osney Island, was previously the scene of a savage sexual murder, and Terry soon finds the past returning to invade the present with horrific consequences.
A traumatized stray cat which eats its own babies, a famous neighbour involved in a hushed-up sexual scandal, and the discover) of a series of pornographic letters all serve to involve Terry in a mystery more brutal and more elusive than any tackled by the fictional detectives she studies.
'A debut to die for...The Poison Tree is several notches more intelligent than most of its genre...So assured is the writing that I found it hard at times to believe that The Poison Tree is the author's first novel. Debuts don't come much better' The Times
'Scott Turow, Michael Dibdin, Barbara Vine...The Poison Tree is clearly in the class of these writers' work, in pace of plot, clear characterisation and writerly skills, but its striking physicality combined with an intellectual force sets it apart. I loved it' Malcolm Gluck
'..a detective novel for the late Nineties. The Poison Tree is intelligent, erotic and violent.. A brilliantly written thriller that is as chilling and claustrophobic as a deathbed' Tony Parsons
'Sophisticated and thought-provoking... An enigmatic psychological thriller' The Times Literary Supplement
'Witty, assured and clever...Well-drawn characters, a horribly ingenious plot and a heart-stopping climax make for an accomplished literary thriller' Cosmopolitan
'Assured and clever' Manchester Evening News
'A sexy, disturbing, Gothic thriller...[The Poison Tree] is a breath of fresh spring air and Tony Strong is a novelist whose talent is clearly in full bloom. Just read it' Oxford Mail
'There are indeed few first novels which are as assured as The Poison Tree ... A dark and creepy mixture of male rape, wife-swapping, bitching academics, poetry and murder...A tale well told of colossal vanity, rampaging egos, and a mind twisted by the need for revenge...A stylish and gripping triumph' Oxford Times
'A remarkably assured piece of writing... Incredibly powerful and disturbing...An exciting debut' Publishing News

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About The Author
Tony Strong's entry on to the literary scene is the stuff that dreams are made of. For most first-time authors, trying to get an agent to even look at a manuscript can take years. For Tony Strong things happened quite differently.
Within 24 hours of sending out his manuscript Caradoc King, the managing director of A.P Watt, the agent behind The Horse Whisperer, had rung him up. Two weeks later, a six-figure deal for two books was signed by Transworld, with US rights also sold to Bantam Doubleday Dell.
Tony Strong was born in 1962 in Uganda, though his parents came back to the UK when he was six weeks old. (This involved smuggling him through customs in a zipped-up holdall, as he was too young to have the required inoculations). Tony was educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he read English under the playwright and poet Francis Warner. He graduated with a First, intending to do an M.Lit, but quickly got bored and decided to apply for a job as an advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, where he stayed for twelve years. O&M was a very literary advertising agency: he joined a few years after Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon had left to become full-time writers.
Tony Strong's best-known work at Ogilvy & Mather was on the BUPA You're Amazing. We Want You To Stay That Way campaign and the American Express Testimonials campaign.. Tony Strong also won a BAFTA for a campaign aimed at reducing solvent abuse - one of the very few drug abuse campaigns that has ever been shown to have a measurable effect. In all Tony has made more than thirty television commercials, which has involved working with some of the world's top film-makers.
Tony Strong recently moved to Abbott Mead Vickers whose main account is British Telecom.
Tony Strong is married with three children. His wife is a pig farmer and so he divides his time between the family home in Oxfordshire and his flat in London. Tony Strong is currently working on his second novel.

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Bibliography

The Poison Tree (Doubleday) (1997) Pbk 07 May 98

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