Trent’s Last Case

When the ruthless American financier Sigsbee Manderson is found shot dead on his English country estate, the newspapers send artist and amateur detective Philip Trent to solve the case. He assembles a brilliant chain of deductions, names his culprit, and then discovers that he has got almost everything wrong. Bentley wrote the book partly to poke fun at the infallible sleuths of the Sherlock Holmes school, and the result quietly overturned the rules of the genre: his detective is fallible, falls in love with a suspect, and walks away from the chase. Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie both admired it, and it is often called the first modern detective novel. This free PDF and EPUB edition preserves a landmark of crime writing.