Twenty-One Days by Anne Perry

Twenty-One Days by Anne Perry - 303 pages ⭐⭐✫✫✫

Young defense attorney Daniel Pitt has twenty-one days to prove his client's innocence, else his client will be executed for murdering his wife.  

Have you ever watched a two-hour episode of Dateline that didn't need to be two hours long?  Upon returning from each commercial break, you get to hear The Facts Thus Far summed up over and over, while the detectives continue to be stymied by the case that's rapidly growing cold.  It's not until hour two that things start to get interesting.  By the end, you find out that the murderer is whoever you thought it was all along, and you think of all the much more worthwhile things you could've done with your time. 

Twenty-One Days is like one of those two-hour Dateline episodes.  Most of the book consists of Daniel either filling in his acquaintances on The Facts Thus Far, or debating whether his client is guilty.  These conversations and musings are almost always repeats of each other, adding little or nothing to what the characters had previously talked or thought about.  I was only about 80 pages in when I began to doubt that Anne Perry had enough story for a 300 page novel.  

To make matters worse, there is very little description of the setting or the characters.  This is historical fiction, set in the Edwardian period, but it lacks atmosphere that would give it a real sense of time and place.  Mentions of women's suffrage and Daniel's amazement at an X-ray machine are the only elements that establish the setting.  Perry's descriptions of rooms are decent, but her descriptions of London are minimal at best and nonexistent at worst.  Character descriptions are equally lacking, often so ambiguous as to be useless.  Perry repeatedly describes one character as having an "odd face."  What is that supposed to mean?  "Odd" is so vague and subjective that it remains a mystery what Perry meant this character to look like.  Instead of springing to life, the characters and setting remained indistinct in my mind, mere words on the page rather than real people in a real city.

This is not to say that Twenty-One Days has no redeeming qualities.  Daniel Pitt is a likeable character, reminiscent of Phoenix Wright in that he is an inexperienced and rather naïve attorney with a detective's instinct.  The plot does become more interesting towards the second half of the book, with a few twists I didn't see coming.  For the most part, however, Twenty-One Days offers all of the repetition of a too-long Dateline episode without Keith Morrison's chilling narration -- and I would rather watch one of those episodes than read this book again.  Unfortunately, this book is the pit(t)s.