This book has had almost unilaterally good reviews and I am not going to disagree. The author's skill is to take a rather bland murder in a Somerset country house - there was no sex, drugs or money involved - and recreate it with true verve and fascination as a story for the 21st century, relating it with skill and relevance to the works of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Poe and other writers who became swept up in the saturation press coverage of the death of little Saville Kent. As other reviewers have intimated, the mystery of the lad's death is well covered in anthologies of 19th Century murder (Kate Summerscale does not pretend to have unearthed a long lost secret and, in fact, she creates very little that's new) but her adroitness in weaving together domestic life in a dysfunctional middle class household with contemporary policing, contemporary literature, the baying of the public and the scorn heaped upon poor Jack Whicher is remarkable. The book is dense with names and facts which give a sense of being told the whole story but it does not make it a heavy read. There is an engrossing insight into the mores of the 1860's and a poignancy in the telling of the protagonists' lives.The story skips along with nimble twists and turns and it would make a terrific film. I see Sir Michael Gambon as Samuel Kent, by the way, but as no photograph or painted portrait exists of the man we can all conjure up our own idea of how he might have looked. Put your prejudices to one side if you think this would be a bit of a dull dog: it is a superb story and it is brilliantly told.