The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

'If you love Sherlock Holmes then you'll love this...'

'Very simply, this is a fantastic book, fantastically written and it's a book of deep moral purpose.'

Ekow Eshun, Newsnight Review

'What the book does brilliantly...is look at notions of class, criminality, human nature and religion in an age of change... terrific.'  Ian Rankin, The Guardian

It is a summer's night in 1860.

In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet.

Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home.

The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.

The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing - arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.

A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery - a body; a detective; a country house steeped in secrets. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Watch the Author discussing the book



About the Author

Kate Summerscale was born 1965 and is an award-winning English writer and journalist. She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay. about Joe Carstairs the 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography. She formerly worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. She is also the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph. Her articles have appeared in various national newspapers. She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001.

The birth of the detective - Ian Rankin is intrigued by this real-life whodunit in his review for The Guardian