The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Walter Hartright is a young drawing master who gets his break when he is recommended to teach water colours to the two young ladies under the care of a Mr Fairlie of Limmeridge House, but on his way back to London from his mother's house across Hampstead Heath early in the morning he encounters the eponymous woman in white who has an unspoken connection to Limmeridge, and so she, he and a vividly drawn cast of characters are drawn into a complex dance of deception, fraud, love and powerplay. Held me and drove me on until the last page.

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.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by GW Dahlquist

Convoluted, long but worthwhile victorian melodrama. Celeste Temple is newly arrived to Victorian or Edwardian London from an unnamed island nation, she attaches herself to the first eligable bachelor of suitable social standing that she meets, but when her fiance Roger breaks off their engagement she is interested to know why. Her curiosity leads her into a world of secrets and mystery, of high end prostitutes with strange marks around their eyes, of sex and sensuality and the mysterious glass books. As dreamy as Kubla Khan with arousing eroticism.