Murder Most Original

By Lev Grossmanxs

Very early on the morning of June 30, 1860, a murder took place at an English country house called Road Hill. The owner's son Saville Kent, 3, was gently, silently lifted from his bed. His assailant suffocated him, stabbed him in the chest, cut his throat and finally dropped him head-down through a hole in the servants' outhouse. His body was found later that day. In the months that followed, the Road Hill House murder became a national obsession. It seemed to reveal some sick secret truth lurking in the hushed, upholstered heart of the Victorian household; Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, the first English detective novel, is based on it. The task of solving the crime fell to one Jonathan Whicher, the son of a gardener and one of the original eight London policemen selected to join a new, elite unit of detectives headquartered at Scotland Yard. Kate Summerscale's THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER (Walker; 360 pages) is not just a dark, vicious true-crime story; it is the story of the birth of forensic science, founded on the new and disturbing idea that innocent, insignificant domestic details can reveal unspeakable horrors to those who know how to read them.