Trent's last case (The woman in black) : a story of crime

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong. Trent's Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth as they probe ever deeper in search of a solution to a mystery filled with odd, mysterious twists and turns. Called by Agatha Christie "one of the best detective stories ever written," Trent's Last Case delights with its flesh-and-blood characters, its naturalness and easy humor, and its style, which, as Dorothy Sayers has noted, "ranges from a vividly coloured rhetoric to a delicate and ironical literary fancy." The newly widowed Madel Manderson has a disarming effect on the refreshingly fallible and imaginative Trent, in this classic detective story that twists and turns as a result of the combination of ingenious deductions and misplaced assumptions Trent investigates the death of an industrialist. He solves the case three times, each time getting closer to the truth.