Charles Dickens 
Our Mutual Friend 

Dickens’s last completed novel is a marvel of play-acting and posturing, of taking on roles through delusion, calculation and ambition. It’s a novel commonly described as flawed, but I guess it’s the Dickens novel I love best, and come back to most frequently. The plot of Our Mutual Friend revolves around the murder of John Harmon, a man who was supposed to return to London to inherit a large fortune from his estranged father and marry a woman named Bella Wilfer. … And that means a whole lot of blackmail, a whole lot of murder, and a whole lot of double-crossing.