John Carter Wood takes his title, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, from a statement in one of the hyperbolic popular publications (Sunday Express, 8 July 1928) covering the inquest and trial that ended in Beatrice Pace's acquittal for poisoning her husband. For the most part, this 1928 trial in the Gloucester assize has not entered the lists of famous crimes or trials despite popular press coverage of it for well over a year; thus, those interested in women's issues in court (and out of it) owe Wood for his retrieval. But, indeed, Wood's focus is larger. He argues that the enthusiastic popular press coverage of the case provides a window on interwar “commentary on marriage, domestic violence, and the state of British justice” (6).

In Fetter Hill, a hamlet in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, Henry Pace, in his late thirties and eighteen years married to Beatrice Pace, died in January 1928 after nearly two years of severe stomach pain, debilitation, and general ill health. His funeral, however, was delayed after Pace's siblings (supported by his mother) took their concern that he had been poisoned to the police. The scheduled funeral was delayed until the coroner's juried inquiry was convened. The funeral was held after that initial delay, but this delay was only the beginning. To investigate claims, the coroner required another two months from the initial court appearance of interested parties so that court proceedings only resumed at the end of March and continued for two months. The popular press, at least measured by London journalist Bernard O'Donnell's initial response to a delayed funeral, smelled a potentially sensational story. The proceedings continued for an ongoing press story: Beatrice Pace was named as the likely prosecutable perpetrator in the lengthy coroner's court; her depositions were entered into the record of the magistrate's court; testimony and charges were reviewed by the grand jury; she was imprisoned awaiting trial; and finally, she appeared and was acquitted in a four-and-a-half-day Gloucester assizes criminal trial on 6 July 1928.

But the interest in Mrs. Pace was not over. Despite her expressed concern for privacy, four paid biographical accounts appeared after the verdict (hers in two versions, her eldest daughter's, and journalist O'Donnell's much enhanced text from his perspective as a newly trusted friend). The popular press shortly reported rumors of reopening the case with the ostensible discovery of further private documents, which the police investigated and dismissed. Further, public response to her experience in the case led to an inquiry into police interrogation methods and Parliament's consideration of the procedures of coroner's inquests. The police inquiry led to nothing (with a popular newspaper's apology buried on inside pages), and action from the parliamentary investigation was, like many parliamentary inquiries, tabled for decades.

This very readable book has several strengths. Wood kindly provides a cast of characters, grouped by roles for easy reference, an aid through a lengthy case. (Because of its stages, a chronology would also be useful.) The book's plan through those stages and the cultural reverberations that Wood argues are clearly mapped in his introduction. Wood is an adept storyteller, extensively using popular press representations to craft the story. Further, his research provides us with excerpts from over two hundred notes, cards, and letters to Beatrice Pace, still held by her solicitor's firm.

However, because Wood uses the popular press as a prism through which he views larger cultural issues, we might reasonably ask for a better contextual grounding of it. In his introduction, he claims “[t]he papers offered what they thought their readers wanted, and one can assume that—as is always the case—people made use of press narrates in individual ways influenced by personal experiences, expectations and prejudices” (8). What we miss is the more active role of the popular press to encourage and shape what its readership would respond to, in effect creating desire for a particular version of the story. Although sensational, the popular press was also fundamentally conservative; thus, we might reason, they created “Mrs. Pace” as a dutiful wife, although emotionally and physically abused, and especially as a mother with primary concern for her children. Wood demonstrates through extensive quotation how quickly this popular press representation coalesced even when other crafted narratives were potentially available.

While we have extensive popular press quotations, we do not have popular press corporate files that might indicate intentions. We might, for example, learn of business issues of more inclusive and appealing national coverage that might delimit a perceived otherness of the Forest of Dean as a primitive and inbred community. Wood notes this homogenization without remarking why that might be. Nor do we have context for other narrative lines: how did London's “smart set” journalism frame the case; how did the establishment press frame it? We have only one reference to The Times, and that on the parliamentary investigation of coroner's inquests. We also lack information on how much Mrs. Pace's (and her daughter's) narratives were directed, framed, and possibly written by press staff as was not at all unusual in previous sensational cases. And readers may pause at the number of contradictions and differences in tone when Beatrice Pace responded in depositions and to reporters without popular press handlers despite their mutual financial interests.

Although Wood acknowledges the hyperbole of the popular press, we are nonetheless often encouraged to take it at face value. Toxicology was at the center of a case eventually hinging upon unexplained levels of arsenic. The expert called, retired William Willcox, was touted in the popular press as the “eminent,” “the world-wide authority,” when in fact Willcox's career had fundamentally crashed with his faulty testimony in 1910 in the Crippen case. One popular paper retrospectively credited him with Crippen's conviction, yet the prosecution had been seriously tasked with repair work to Willcox's testimony that came from Bernard Spilsbury, creating him as the acknowledged rising star, well established eighteen years later, and Willcox, regrettably as a methodological relic. Similarly, we lack context for Bernard O'Donnell's apparent desire to become the heir apparent, without success, to crime enthusiast and analyst William Roughead.

By contrast, Wood's most successful chapters incorporate a balance of voices—not simply participants as framed by the popular press, but government and agency records as well. In these, we see the Pace case and its press attention momentarily prompting officialdom's attention to certain issues, but we should also see that the investigations came to nothing (and note as well that the issues may not have been new: George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874) addressed coroners' authority through the progressive medical man, Lydgate's perspective). Wheels may grind fine and slow and may not have the contemporary urgency that Wood attributes to them here, particularly when he concludes that ambiguities prevailed in these larger cultural issues that he had asserted.

Wood immerses us in popular press coverage to retrieve an important case of a woman brought to law, framed entirely by her domestic circumstances. For that material, scholars will be grateful. However, we might also wish for a better contextualization of the popular press's choices, perhaps historically framed by its thirty- to forty-year history, and more modest claims for the popular press coverage and extant readers' responses to signify something as imprecise as the “cultural temper of the times.”