One Sunday afternoon, after church and nearly thirty years of marriage, a Victorian clergyman, John Selby Watson, bludgeons his wife brutally to death in this tale by novelist Beryl Bainbridge. As true to the documented facts of this actual murder case as she is to the workings of her singular imagination, Bainbridge chronicles the seemingly commonplace progress of the Watsons' marriage to its shocking end and a trial that captured England's national headlines. Artfully, too, she supplies what history and the public record withhold: the motives, feelings, banal perversities, and particular brands of insanity that drive the Watsons to their domestic tragedy.