The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale

I don’t generally read the True Crime genre, but this is an unusual case. The 1860 murder of a 3 year old boy in a locked country house inspired the entire canon of crime fiction, with its finite number of suspects, the dashing London detective and the gradual unravelling of family secrets. Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens et al were watching closely.

The detective is the Mr Whicher of the title, and he sounds like an amazing bloke. The history of detectives in this period is fascinating, and the conclusion of the case is tantalisingly only semi-resolved.