Double

When Detective Inspector Richard Staines is called to a murder scene, he encounters something far more disturbing than any case in his decade at Scotland Yard: the victim has his face. A thumbprint, oddly positioned, becomes the only clue in a game where nothing is as it seems. The dead man is a stranger, yet carries documents linking him to Staines's forgotten past at Cambridge, forcing the detective to question everything about his own identity. As he pulls at the thread of this doppelgänger, he finds himself hunted by an enemy who knows him intimately, who may have been watching him for years, and who has orchestrated something far more sinister than a single murder. Wallace, the master who would later give the world King Kong, brings his signature propulsive storytelling to this early gem. The novel pulses with Golden Age tension: gaslit London streets, cryptic clues, and a mystery that coils tighter with each revelation. But beneath the detective fiction structure lies something deeper, a meditation on identity and the unsettling question of whether we truly know ourselves. Staines, the self-made man from Cambridge, discovers that his carefully constructed life may be built on secrets he never knew existed. For fans of classic whodunits, this is Wallace at his most cunning, delivering thrills that still resonate a century later.