The Trail of the Serpent digital (mobi)

“I don’t suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else.”

Few people today will have heard of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of over eighty novels, and the most popular woman novelist of Victorian England. Blending Dickensian humour with nail-biting suspense, The Trail of the Serpent  features Jabez North, a workhouse orphan who becomes a ruthless killer; Richard Marwood, a wayward son wrongly accused of murder; Valerie de Cevennes, a beautiful heiress who falls into Jabez’ diabolical trap; and Mr. Peters, a mute detective, who imparts his brilliant reasoning through sign language. Said to be the first British detective novel, plot devices and elements such as the detective’s use of boy assistants, the planting of evidence on a corpse, and the use of disguise to fool the criminal, were later used by this school of fiction in the twentieth century.