The Duke of York's Steps

A wealthy banker dies on a London landmark, and officially it's just an aneurysm. But his daughter knows better. This is the setup for Henry Wade's 1929 masterpiece, one of the Golden Age's most quietly devastating detective novels. Sir Garth Fratten collapses on the Duke of York's Steps after being jostled by a stranger. The doctor calls it natural causes. No inquest. Case closed. Except Inez Fratten refuses to accept that her father's death was accidental. She places an advertisement in London newspapers that catches Scotland Yard's attention, and Inspector John Poole is assigned to make enquiries. What Poole uncovers is a rot beneath respectable society: high finance concealing fraud, wealthy men debasing themselves over chorus girls, and a reckoning decades in the making. The murderer is not some random villain but a man wronged, a German Jewish banker who lost everything to British anti-Semitism and has waited for his moment. Wade wrote with the precision of a scalpel and the moral seriousness of a novelist who understood that crimes of the counting house leave the deepest wounds.