The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I enjoyed The Woman in White by the same author so much, I thought I'd read this one too. It isn't quite as riveting and suspenseful as The Woman in White but is an engaging and absorbing all the same. The plot is very complex but centres around a diamond stolen from a sacred Hindu statue, in the days when the British still ruled India, by an English army officer. It is passed down through inheritance to Miss Rachel Verinder who only has it for one night before it is stolen from her room. It is the discovery of how and whom stole the diamond that makes up the plot of this book (all 500 plus pages of it).

In the foreword it says that T.S Eliot described the book as 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels'. I don't agree it is the best, like I said before The Woman in White is a better book in my view, but if it is the first detective book written,then as a first attempt at a new genre Collins excels himself.

What I particularly like about the way Wilkie Collins writes is the fact it is so easily accessible to the modern reader. I've read other books written in the 1800s that are written in a language style so idiomatic, so archaic, so far removed from today's modern language to be virtually indecipherable to me. The fact that these books are so easy to read means I shall certainly read more by this author.