So here we are detecting in Victorian England

The suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

In a nutshell: Part social history, part biography, part depiction of Victorian England and part whodunnit, this book deals with the early days of detection though the prism of a true murder committed in Road in 1860.

The blurb: This multi-layered book starts with the true story of the murder of Saville Kent, the youngest member of a middle class Victorian family. This is the whodunnit part of the book : a murder, a large household and a house locked from the inside. We then follow the investigations and suspicions of Detective Jack Whicher, one of the first London detectives, at a time when detection was a new science that had the nation in the grip of 'detection fever'. In this respect, this book is also a social history of the time, cleverly showing the side effects this gruesome- and mystifying- murder had on literature (with the emergence of a new type of novel) and the attitude of Victorian society to the case and the methods used to solve it.

IMHO this was an interesting but not particularly gripping book, definitely not a page turner. It was not written as a whodunnit so, despite not knowing who the murderer is until late on, there is none of the satisfaction of detection in your armchair. Then again, this is a true story, and therefore not as well crafted as a good Agatha Christie. That said, it sometimes seems a little confusing as we skip from Whicher's detection to broader descriptions of society at the time, from trials to flashbacks, from mini-biographies to the influence the case had on Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, amongst others. It works out as an interesting history of early detection and investigation methods, and a pretty mediocre whodunnit.