Lunch at home alone; grandchildren still resting upstairs.

Finished reading The Moonstone last night, through the wee hours of the night. A satisfying literary adventure. Characters, their relationships, plots, and subplots are as complex as in The Woman in White. Four characters died--strangely, four characters also died in The Woman in White. As in The Woman in White, though, I felt that the ending was rushed and over-consciously written to tie things up.

I strongly agree with critics that Wilkie Collins was the inventor of the detective story. The same critics indicate that his later novels "deteriorated", and so Moonstone and Woman are his two legacies. I wouldn't mind reading those later novels, though, except that they are not available in bookstores.