A silent witness

About the book

Walking through Hampstead late at night, Humphrey Jardine discovers a motionless man and uses his medical knowledge to establish that the stranger is dead. He leaves to summon assistance, only to find that the body has vanished. What should have been a straightforward report becomes an unsettling problem of evidence: Jardine knows what he examined, but cannot produce the most important object in his account. The mystery brings him into a wider sequence of suspicious events and into contact with the scientific investigator Dr. Thorndyke. Freeman makes professional observation central to the suspense, asking what can be recovered from traces after an apparently decisive fact has disappeared. The investigation requires both confidence in careful examination and skepticism toward conclusions drawn too quickly from it.

• Observation and proof
• Scientific detection
• Hidden danger

Why read it

The missing body's challenge to a trained observer gives Thorndyke's methods a particularly concrete problem to solve.

English Dodd, Mead & Company text of 1929