The honest truth is we will almost certainly never know who killed Julia Wallace. It's a liberty for Mr. Gannon to accuse Marsden of murder based on no evidence whatsoever, just a fanciful theory, and trumpet this skein of irrelevancies as some kind of "solution." It's an outlandish theory and nothing more.
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I found the book very inaccessible. For those who are not already intimately acquainted with the case and its characters, I imagine it would be very heavy going. There seems no logical exposition of either the background to the case or the theory. Instead of genuine footnotes or sources, we have an appendix of family trees of the walk-on players, going back 200 years! Seriously, wtf is that all about? It can only be padding to cover the fact that at the heart of this book, there really is next to nothing...
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But I am reading it a second time, and in fairness will mention anything of note if and when I find it.
For me, Wilkes' book "The Final Verdict" remains the tour de force of the case, although I don't quite share the conclusion. Atmospheric, humane, logical, emotive, crusading, the last to interview first-hand witnesses; two detective stories in one, gripping, edge-of-the-seat stuff... Unputdownable...
Find it if you can...
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