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 enlarge | Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $8.23
You Save: $16.72 (67%)
New (50) Used (35) from $8.23
Avg. Customer Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 5615
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 0802715354
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1523094231
EAN: 9780802715357
ASIN: 0802715354
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Fabulous Read! September 26, 2008
This book reads with the pace and thrill of a murder mystery, but every detail is real. A little boy, nearly four, had his throat slit and his body was tossed into the cistern of an outhouse on the grounds of his upscale family's home in 1860. There are 12 people in the country manor at the time, some family members and others servants. Other hired hands live on the grounds, and everyone falls under suspicion eventually. To help you follow the clues, Summerscale gives a cast of characters, photos, a family tree, maps, diagrams, engravings, courtroom sketches, and so on. Enter Jack Whicher, one of Scotland Yard's first eight detectives. After about five years as a constable in uniform on the beat, he now donned plain clothes and sometimes worked undercover. He had a great intuition about criminals and a marvelously meticulous method of investigating a crime, but such a detective was suspect in the England of his day. The upper classes considered him little more than the "hired help," quite beneath their station, and he was to be resented for the fact that his position allowed him to part the veil on personal affairs in that hush-hush era--even though they might greatly need his help, as in this case.
Jack was a real Sherlock Holmes, 27 years before the latter became known. But a few detective stories had been published by the time of the Road House murder, and the public expected a quick and brilliant discovery of the culprit. Yet crime scene investigation was very primitive in those days, and Whicher was not called into the case until two weeks after the murder. He did a masterful job of his investigation, developing a reasonable theory of the case, but he could not collect enough hard evidence to advance toward a conviction. Perhaps the author's best feat in writing this book was that she was able to move beyond the whodunit and its characters, although both are skillfully portrayed, to give us a detailed feeling of that era. Who knew, for example, that an accused person was not allowed to speak at his or her own trial? Or that questions of modesty and propriety would muffle courtroom questioning to the point of making it useless? Summerscale skillfully blends such shocking revelations with quotidian detail, so that we get the full flavor of the times.
When the case went cold, Whicher retreated to London in disgrace. Because the Kent murder had such notoriety, his supposed "failure" went widely published in the newspapers. Less than four years after his debacle, he retired from the police force but lived on to see the murderer (in a surprise move) confess to the crime. Even after that denouement, Summerscale carries her book on further, letting us know what happened to all the major players in the end. This is a full meal, from start to finish. Her writing and research are superb, and the story is compelling. Who could ask for anything more?
Well Presented and Paced September 24, 2008
Like the mystery surrounding the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby or the death of Jon Benet Ramsey, the only way the guilty will every be known is if the confess. This murder in 1860 was like a locked room mystery. There was no way that an intruder could have gotten in without the help of some one inside. Even then it would have had to have been some one who knew the habits of the family and the layout of the building.
The murder of a four year old boy by one of his siblings or half-siblings or parent or servant was the only choice. Who among the fourteen people in the house that night could have done the deed? What makes this story so intriguing is that there are children of two marriages living in one house. The second wife was the governess for the children of the first wife. Was there duplicity between the siblings to one of the second wife's child?
With the use of information from both Scotland Yard, newspaper stories written at the time just after the murder, and books by some of those involved, there are a plethora of theories as to the perpertrator(s). That there was a confession, trial and convictions doesn't end the story. Lots of fun for the closet detective.
Zeb Kantrowitz
 Painful - A disorganized memory dump September 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An enthusiastic newspaper review lead me to try to read this book. I expected a history with multiple threads: Victorian family life, the beginning of detection, the beginning of the detective novel, ...
As other reviews here have stated, the book hammers you with a mass of details, many of them irrelevant or tangential. The writing is very poor for this type of book - It is a dry "just the facts" rendering, what you might expect from a bureaucratic report meant to be filed away unread. An analogy is that the chapters are a collection of research notes that the author intended to come back to to write the book. Even at the level of individual paragraphs, the writing often does not flow smoothly.
Especially frustrating was jarring jumping between threads of the story: I would struggle through the blizzard of facts to construct a mental image only to have to start over on a different thread. I have read multiple other histories that managed to handle similar multi-threaded stories by disciplined presentation of the facts and connections between the threads.
After a couple of exhausting chapters, I jumped forward several times, found the same deadly dull writing and gave up.
I Wanted To Enjoy Reading This Book September 10, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I must wholeheartedly agree with the previous, one-star reviews of this book. I borrowed it from the library because of the basically good reviews this book received. Within 5 pages, I was overwhelmed with detail and facts: how far a door was left open; who visited; what they were paid; places and times of train changes for the detective's commute; details of seemingly every arrest he made. The detail and number of characters was confusing and maddening. I skipped through the text to see if the storytelling improved; it didn't. It was as dull as dishwater for me. I could not finish the book because I just didn't care about the dry, flat characters. This is a case of where more is less.
Terrible September 7, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
One of the few books I simply could not finish. To hard to slog all the way through it. Not the fast paced real life crime thriller I was looking for.
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