The Woman in White

⚖The case for it

Collins wrote to a magazine schedule, and it shows: the middle sags, and the last stretch buries you in affidavits and courtroom paperwork. Push through, because two characters make the whole thing worth your evenings. Marian Halcombe is quick, clear-eyed, and warmer company than most heroines of her century, and Collins gives her a rival worth fearing in Count Fosco, plump and soft-spoken and lethally courteous, owning every room he walks into. The way the story arrives through stacked eyewitness accounts taught a hundred later thrillers how to work.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Laura Fairlie, the woman the whole conspiracy turns on, is a blank: pretty, passive, interchangeable by design and by authorial neglect. Marian Halcombe, the actual heroine, gets benched by fever at the worst possible moment. At six hundred pages of serial-novel padding, the final third turns into a procedural slog of depositions. Fosco deserves a tighter book.

— the honest librarian