SOURCE: “Love and Death, High and Low,” in Chicago Tribune Books, June 4, 1995, p. 3.

In the following review, Dunford offers a generally positive assessment of Poison, noting that Harrison's prose is often too stylized.

Fans of Kathryn Harrison's last novel, Exposure, a psychological study as up-to-date as the chilling Metropolitan section of the daily paper, may be surprised by Poison. Harrison has moved backward in time, some 300 years.

Poison takes place in late 17th Century Spain. Long past its Golden Age, the country is in economic and political decline; the Venetian ambassador writes home in 1690 that Spain is “a series of unending calamities.” On the throne sits Charles II, the infantile, physically and mentally damaged consequence of constant Hapsburg intermarriage. He would die childless at 35, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

Relentless ethnic cleansing is taking place, 300 years since the first Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, persuaded their Majesties...