For the vast majority of people, child murder does not bear thinking about.

But Kate Summerscale, the former literary editor of The Telegraph, took a different view.

Now the mother of a five-year-old boy, she thought it would be a good idea to investigate the notorious Road Hill House murder of three-year-old Saville Kent, stolen from his cot one summer's night in 1960 and brutally killed.

Ms Summerscale read about the Road Hill murder in an old anthology of Victorian murder cases and decided it was worth a closer look.

She then took a gamble by quitting her job to concentrate on research for the book.

It took two years and the gamble paid off handsomely — earlier this year, the book won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

I found the details of the murder contained in the first couple of chapters quite shocking, but when I discovered the killer came from the house itself, I wanted to read on to find out not only whodunnit but also how Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard conducted his inquiry.

By minutely reconstructing Whicher's investigation, the author puts the detective at the heart of the narrative, and attempts to write a true crime book structured like a mystery novel. It's a difficult trick to pull off but I think she succeeds.

There was a great deal of documentation linked to the case and the author spent months in libraries, reading old newspapers and pamphlets. Ms Summerscale doesn't spare the reader the gruesome details, but once it starts to point towards the killer’s identity, the book takes on another dimension and the narrative becomes a fascinating look at Victorian class structure, and the relationships contained in one middle-class family.

The author starts her story on the night before the murder, in the elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire.

Behind shuttered windows, the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks.

The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery — an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home.

The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task — to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.

The murder provoked national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes — scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing — arouses fear and a kind of excitement.

But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.

A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this book has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery — a body, a detective and a country house steeped in secrets.

Ms Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Kate Summerscale was born in 1965. She is the author of the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award.

The Queen of Whale Cay was about the eccentric Marion Carstairs, heiress to the Standard Oil fortune.

Carstairs was a cross-dressing lesbian millionairess who ruled an island in the Bahamas.

The author has worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Telegraph, subsequently moving on to the role of literary editor.

Ms Summerscale has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in London with her young son.