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

Summerscale relates the true story of the murder on the night of 30 June 1860 of the youngest son of the family at Road Hill House, throat cut wide open and dumped down the servant's toilet in the grounds of the house. The murder exposes the internal workings of the upper middle class family, jealousy, adultery, guilt, grief and hatred. The Road Hill House case is significant in that it was one of the very first detective investigations undertaken by the fledgling Scotland yard and the story of the murder and the character of the detectives, in particular the lead detective Mr Whicher, directly inspired the early victorian melodramas and penny dreadfuls from Wilike Collins' The Moonstone to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Informed by contemporary developments in psychology, in particular the emerging theories of Freud, this is the classic murder mystery: the germ of the detective and crime novel which traces its routes through Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie to the present day.

I found the book interesting, but not compelling. It is perhaps the point of the book that because of our thorough grounding the present day with regard to forensic psychology which had its origins in the alienists and detectives of this time, that I knew pretty quickly who the murderer was and why. I did finish the book but there was no mystery to it and I found it rather dry and in the end unfulfilling.