Bleak House: Crime Classics

by Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.27

  The case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce - a dispute over a vast fortune left by a miser who died intestate - has occupied the Court of Chancery for years. When Lady Dedlock faints upon recognizing the handwriting in one of the documents pertaining to the case, her sinister lawyer, Tulkinghorn, immediately suspects a hidden secret - and an opportunity for blackmail...But he is playing a dangerous game, and is soon found dead: a victim of murder. It is down to Detective Inspector Bucket to solve the mystery. Dickens was fascinated by the sensational crime cases of his day. His preoccupations - with crime and the legal system, with social injustice - are dramatically evident in Bleak House: at once a classic crime novel and a classic of world literature.

• Used

  Paperback
  1976

  $3.27

• Used

  Hardcover
  1987

  $11.92

  Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket. And it is a fable about redemption, in which a bleak house is transformed by the resilience of human love.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $18.59

  The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it.