Comment: The safe choice, but a thoroughly satisfying read

Every book deserved to win, not always the case at all. What then to do, for the judges? There was Tim Butcher's superb travelogue, Blood River: A Journey To Africa's Broken Heart, recreating Stanley's journey through the Congo. Mark Cocker's Crow Country, about corvids in Norfolk, is a fine specimen of the work of the new nature writers (Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin) who have quietly re-established one of our greatest literary traditions.

Orlando Figes's The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin's Russia is a major feat of historical research into an appallingly significant subject, only now being opened up. Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century is an engaging account of music in our time which nobody else could have made half so illuminating. I myself would have chosen as winner the best literary biography of the year, The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French. It allows you to understand the life and work of perhaps our greatest living writer as never before - but Naipaul's unattractive character and often apparently reprehensible story made it always an improbable winner.

The book the judges ultimately selected, Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher, was just as meritorious but also the safest choice - perhaps, in the end, a compromise, as these decisions generally are.

Summerscale has gone back to one of the earliest murder mysteries to have attracted the kind of public attention and speculation we've seen recently with the Madeleine McCann case, and she has laid out the puzzling facts with a patient devotion to detail that wins the reader's trust. The story has everything.

It's a country house inside job. Mr Whicher is one of the very first detectives. The crime exposes the hidden truth about not just a family but an entire society. And it all happens before any modern forensics shortcircuited all the old procedures.

It's a thoroughly satisfying read, brilliantly researched, winningly told, and it's hard to see how this subject could possibly have been better treated. It'll stand as a true crime classic.

Still, tidily and perfectly performed though The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher may be, nobody could really have thought it the most significant and innovative book on this year's shortlist. Prizes, eh? Now there's a mystery.