(Named one of Time magazine's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year) In 1860 Britain, three-year-old Saville Kent is found murdered in the outhouse of his family's country estate, in Kate Summerscale's re-creation of the notorious Constance Kent case, which includes 18 pages of photographs. Scotland Yard's finest detective Jonathan Whicher is called in and soon surmises the unthinkable—that someone in the Kent family killed Saville. Everyone from the nursemaid to Saville's father becomes a suspect, but when Whicher cannot conclusively identify the killer, his career and reputation are on the line.

"It is not just a dark, vicious true-crime story, it is the story of the birth of forensic science."

"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 to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world."—NYTBR