Kate Summerscale is the author of the number one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama. Her first book, the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Her third book, Mrs Robinson's Disgrace, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Kate Summerscale was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. She lives in London.

katesummerscale.com

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK

'A classic' John le Carré

'Nothing less than a masterpiece' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

'Absolutely riveting' Sarah Waters, Guardian

'Terrific' Ian Rankin

'A triumph' Observer

On a summer's morning in 1860, the Kent family awakes in their elegant Wiltshire home to a terrible discovery; their youngest son has been brutally murdered. When celebrated detective Jack Whicher is summoned from Scotland Yard he faces the unenviable task of identifying the killer - when the grieving family are the suspects.

The original Victorian whodunnit, the murder and its investigation provoked national hysteria at the thought of what might be festering behind the locked doors of respectable homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing.

It is a beautiful piece, written with great lucidity and respect for the reader, and with immaculate restraint. A classic, to my mind, of the finest documentary writing

I can't think of another book which takes you so fast into the smells, tastes and atmosphere of that time

A pacy analysis of a true British murder case from 1860, the unravelling of which involved one of the earliest Scotland Yard detectives and inspired sensation novelists such as Dickens and Wilkie Collins ... Absolutely riveting

Summerscale has constructed nothing less than a masterpiece ... My shelves are stacked with books about crime, but none more satisfying than this

Gripping, unputdownable

A terrific read in the Wilkie Collins tradition

A page-turning merging of scrupulous research with vivid storytelling. Full of atmosphere and stroking detail, it is a triumph

There is some terrific detail in Summerscale's book ... What the book does brilliantly ... is look at notions of class, criminality, human nature and religion in an age of change ... Engrossing

A remarkable achievement

Summerscale has produced not only a dazzling non-fiction thriller but also an acute work of literary and social history

A tour de force. It sweeps us irresistibly into the investigation, turning us into armchair detectives ... Under teh spell of Kate Summerscale's scrupulous intelligence and mesmerizing research, we are drawn into a detective story within a detective story that takes us halfway into the 20th century

An unexpectedly moving thriller

Kate Summerscale brilliantly reconstructs the circumstance of the murder, the course of the investigation, and the long, sad consequences ... Her narrative has the dark fascination of the sensational fiction her subject helped to inspire

One of the Victorian era's most intriguing murder mysteries is given a fresh and gripping examination

A dramatic page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder tat inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. Kate Summerscale has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller ... leaves one gripped until the final paragraph

A thoroughly satisfying read, brilliantly researched, winningly told, and it's hard to see how this subject could have been better treated. It'll stand as a true crime classic

Fact and fiction do not so much blur as bleed into each other in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher ... Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do any more, which is use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world

The best whodunnit of the year - and it's all true. The fascinating story of a famous Victorian murder case and thedetective who solved it has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery ... Agatha Christie, eat your heart out