A charred skeleton, a missing man, and a chain of physical clues no one else can read – Dr Thorndyke brings the exacting eye of the forensic laboratory to a death that baffles the police.
R. Austin Freeman was the great pioneer of the scientific detective story, and his medico-legal investigator John Thorndyke remains one of fiction's most rigorous minds. In The Bones of the Case, first collected in 1918, Thorndyke reconstructs a crime from the smallest of material traces, following the evidence with the patience of a true scientist. Freeman is also credited with inventing the inverted mystery, in which the reader watches the crime before the detection begins.