The Poison Oracle

Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom s educational facilities, include a somewhat reserved English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in the person of Dinah: a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols.

When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to discover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that uses the everyday language people use to expose humanity s thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth.

"The Poison Oracle" is the second in a series of reprints of Peter Dickinson s mysteries from Small Beer Press."