Bleak House

A detective mystery with genuine suspense, Bleak House features one of Charles Dickens’s best narratives and several of his strongest and most developed characters. It is obvious from both the finished work and Dickens’s private papers that he carefully considered the plot of the entire serial well in advance of writing each chapter, which is a key reason the book works so well as a novel, while also retaining depth as a legal satire (on the inefficiency of the Court of Chancery). And this is one of the great books about London, the foggy city and its dense fog a character itself.