No Thoroughfare

This excellent collaboration between two great 19th-century writers shows all of Dickens' talent for description and characterization and all of Collins' skill at creating suspense. Walter Wilding, left at a foundlings' hospital as an infant by his distressed mother and recovered by her as an adolescent, is profoundly disturbed to discover that he is the wrong Walter Wilding, and his beloved mother wasn't his mother at all. Accordingly, he wills her legacy to the correct Walter Wilding, if he can be found.  His partner and executor, George Vendale, inherits the quest, but holds it lightly, until he falls in love, becomes entangled with a serious crime and goes on a desperate journey.  As a romance, this novel is fairly tame; as a crime story, it foreshadows the procedural, yet its ending still comes as a surprise.