SOURCE: “The Faithless Priest and the Obsessed Harlot,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 18, 1995, p. 8.

In the following positive review, Hansen argues that Poison is an elegant example of well-written historical fiction—a genre that typically portrays the contrasts and similarities between a past era and the current one.

In 1679 Marie Louise de Bourbon, the niece of Louis XIV, the Sun King, married Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, in the village of Quintanapalla, Spain. She and Carlos were both 18. The princess was tall, beautiful and vivacious, fond of frolics and horseback riding; the king was short, ugly and gloomy, given to paranoia and superstitions and so many everlasting illnesses that he confined his food to bowls of breast milk supplied by a platoon of healthy wet nurses.

With Carlos infirmities and probable impotence or sexual ineptitude, it is not surprising that the regents were...