Not long ago, a few infamous women arrived at the shop.

Now they have company.

A box containing copies of Society’s Deadliest Soirées arrived this week, the second book in the Infamous Women Series, and apparently the respectable women have decided they would like a little shelf space too.

Respectable, of course, depends on whom you ask.

The first book, Infamous Women of Florida: Pre-1900, dealt with women who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, society, or history. Sometimes all three.

This new book moves into rather different rooms. These women had invitations.

They attended dinners and parties. They traveled in respectable circles. They had husbands, homes, acquaintances, reputations, and in some cases enough social standing that no one would have thought twice about sitting beside them at supper. That may have been a mistake.

Society’s Deadliest Soirées looks at women whose names became connected with murder, poison, suspicion, scandal, and deaths that were discussed far beyond the parlors where some of their stories began.

It is an interesting corner of history because these cases do not always begin in dark alleys or rough places. Sometimes they begin at the table.

There is something particularly unsettling about a crime hidden beneath ordinary manners. A cup is poured. Dinner is served. Guests talk. Someone complains of feeling ill.

Women accused of poisoning have always occupied a peculiar place in newspapers and public imagination. Poison was quiet. It did not require physical strength. Illness could disguise it, at least for a while, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medicine did not always make the truth easy to discover.

That uncertainty made excellent newspaper copy. It also made reputations difficult to untangle later.

Some women were clearly guilty. Some cases were complicated. Some were tried as much in the newspapers as they were in courtrooms. And occasionally the story people remembered was considerably neater than the evidence.

Those are usually the stories worth looking at again.

One thing these old cases continually remind me is how much history depends upon who was doing the writing at the time.

A woman could become a monster in three newspaper columns. She could also become a curiosity.

The widow, the beauty, the poisoner, and the society woman.

Once a newspaper found the right description, it tended to follow her around.

More than a century later, those descriptions are often still following.

That may be one reason I like this series, it goes back and looks again.

Not to excuse anyone. Some of these women certainly do not need defending, but there is a difference between reading the legend and reading what actually happened, the latter is almost always more interesting.

So now the shop has another collection of troublesome women on the shelves.

The first group came out of early Florida, this group came dressed for dinner. I am beginning to wonder what sort of women are going to arrive in the next box.

For the moment, Society’s Deadliest Soirées has joined Infamous Women of Florida: Pre-1900 here at Uncommon Bookshop.

I have placed them together.

It seemed safer that way.