Trent is a dilettante and artist who occasionally is requisitioned to solve murders by the editor of a London newspaper. Trent's Last Case concerns the mysterious death of an American multi-millionaire living in England and married to a young and beautiful wife. E. C. Bentley (1875 - 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. The success of Trent's Last Case inspired him to write a sequel, Trent's Own Case (1936) and a book of Trent short stories, Trent...

Trent's Last Case is in fact the first novel in which the sleuth Philip Trent makes his first appearance. The novel breaks new ground in detective fiction history because it is the first novel of any substance that breaks all the rules of the genre: Trent falls in love with one of the primary suspects, and even worse than that, after painstakingly collecting all the evidence, he comes to the the wrong conclusions. This book is a gripping and fascinating story, a mystery that is supposedly solved half way through the book, and then it gets even more interesting. Full of twists and turns, it is...