The Guilty River

A young heir comes home to his estate on an English river and finds the miller's daughter he loves sought by the mill's lodger, a deaf man of terrible temper and some medical learning. Collins invented the detective novel with The Moonstone and spent his last years deep in laudanum; the deaf man's own written confession, threaded through the book, is one of the strangest voices he ever produced. Fifty-nine plates by painters from Constable to Grimshaw follow the mill, the river and the harbour lights that give this tale of a water-side inheritance its weather and its dread.