The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

One night in June, 1860 in an gentleman's house in Wiltshire, 3 year old Saville Kent was taken from his bed and murdered. When the house awoke the next day, and it was discovered that the child was missing, the family, staff and neighbouring villagers began searching for him. His body was found down an outdoor toilet. His throat had been cut and he had several stab wounds.

It's a totally engrossing story - house, servants, neighbours, mental illness, questionable officials, etc - and complete with a floor plan and a list of 'characters', you the reader are invited to solve the crime yourself. It's about 100% up my street. Tick!

The really fascinating thing about the book though, is the details of the history of the birth of the police force and, more specifically, detective work as a type of police work. The detective branch was reasonably new in the 1860s, and the art of detection completely captivated the public.

This crime then, completely brutal and horrific as it was, as you might imagine, was the talk of the town. With so much public interest and so much pressure for an arrest, the detective in charge, Mr Whicher, to pull one out of the bag. But with no one in the family talking, a far from undisturbed crime scene and the science of detection in but its infancy, solving this case was no easy task. Mr Whicher, in spite of the arrest and conviction recorded, was never quite the same after this case, and went into a kind of semi-retirement for a while.

This true crime spawned an entire generation of fiction - country house, brutal murder, village gossips, long carriage rides - and similarities between this and classic detective works by the likes of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan-Doyle are obvious. So, yes, it's sad that this poor kid was gruesomely put to death, but we did get some stella writing out of it, if that's any consolation.

I sincerely doubt you're ever going to read this, but I'm absolutely not going to tell you who done it, since that is still a matter for conjecture anyway. I will say that the two prime suspects went on to reside the better part of their lives in Australia and led rich and productive lives, and Mr Whicher didn't do too badly for himself, either. Except for Saville, and his his dad (who kind of deserved what he got anyway), everyone who lived lived happily ever after, the end.