The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
323 pages

I read this on the recommendation of my girlfriend, who is a bit of a Collins fan. A 19th century writer and friend of Dickens, Collins wrote a lot for the various magazines of that time, including The Moonstone, which shows.

As it was written for magazine publication, it's a very rambling, longwinded book with a fair share of coincidences and improbibilities but Collins is a good enough writer to keep you interested nonetheless. This book was one of the earliest detective stories written and as such predates a lot of the conventions of the genre as popularised by the Sherlock Holmes stories. The detective in this story does not solve the crime, for one...

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