The Twisted Root by Anne Perry

The Twisted Root: A Novel by Anne Perry --- 346 pages

In the tenth book in Perry's William Monk series, set in Victorian England, private enquiry agent William Monk and his bride, nurse Hester Latterly, are just returned from their honeymoon and settling into their new roles as husband and wife, when Monk is asked to search for a lady who fled precipitously from her own engagement party and has not been seen or heard from since. 

The frantic young bridegroom, Lucius Stourbridge, wants Monk's help to locate  his missing fiance, Mrs. Miriam Gardiner, a young widow in modest circumstances, with whom he fell in love at first sight.

All was well between them, he insists; his parents had welcomed the engagement, even though Miriam's bith and background did not compare to his own as the heir to wealth, a great estate and a distinguished name.   

Miriam ran from the party at his parents' London townhouse, along with the Stourbridge's coachman, Treadwell, and their coach and horses. At first Lucius and his family supposed she had asked Treadwell to take her back to her own house, on Hampstead Heath.  But Miriam is not at her home, and the coachman, coach and horses have also vanished.

Lucius is crushed; his parents and his maternal uncle, Aiden Campbell, who traveled to London just to attend the engagement party, all profess themselves mystified and equally concerned. However, when Monk interviews them separately, Lucius's mother, Verona Stourbridge, admits Miriam was, socially, not the ideal match for her son, often over-familiar with servants --- and at least nine years older than Lucius.

As Monk continues to investigate, he discovers the missing coachman has turned up, murdered, on Hampstead Heath.  Indeed the evidence shows the dying man had crawled some distance, and his body was found sprawled on the footpath leading to the house where Miriam Gardiner's foster mother still lives. With still no sign of Miriam herself, the police consider her a prime suspect in the murder. Monk, who was once a police investigator himself, until he was fired for insubordination, finds that solution a little too obvious and convenient. With Hester's assistance, Monk pursues a broader investigation, looking into the past for reasons that explain Miriam's strange behavior. As all good Anne Perry mysteries do, the truth is only revealed in a final, climactic courtroom scene.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Dark Tide Rising by Anne Perry

Dark Tide Rising: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 289 pages

This is the 24th entry in Anne Perry's atmospheric Victorian mystery series featuring William Monk, Commander of the Thames River Police, and his wife Hester, a nurse who volunteered to serve with Florence Nightingale on the front lines of the Crimean War. 

Kate Exeter, the wife of a wealthy London real estate developer, has been  kidnapped in broad daylight from a riverside walk in Battersea Park, witnessed by her cousin and confidante Celia Darwin.The kidnappers have demanded an enormous ransom, which her frantic husband Harry Exeter has barely managed to scrape together in the 24 hours allowed him. Exeter has been directed to bring the ransom to a meeting place deep in the waterlogged and sinking slums of Jacob's Island, and he asks Monk to accompany him --- to insure that he finds the right spot and gets his wife safely away after the money is handed over. Monk, who still suffers flashbacks from when Hester was kidnapped --- Corridors of the Night (2015) ---  takes five of his most trusted officers, hoping that once Exeter and his wife are safe, he and his men can return to track down the kidnappers. But on the night of the exchange, all their careful plans go disastrously awry when Monk and his men are brutally ambushed.

Who is to blame for what went wrong? Monk must face the terrible suspicion that one of his own men betrayed his plan to the kidnappers. Now he and his men have a murder to solve, but tensions mount because no one knows who can be trusted. Then a bookkeeper for the banker who helped Harry Exeter raise the money for the ransom approaches Monk with her suspicions that money has been quietly disappearing from a large trust fund that Kate Exeter was due to inherit within a year. Suspicions that point to Kate's cousin and trustee, Maurice Latham; to the bank manager, Roger Doyle; even to Harry Exeter himself.

Anne Perry at her best, with several overlapping mysteries to solve: kidnapping, murders, embezzlement and betrayal.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

An Echo of Murder by Anne Perry

An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 286 pages

In this 23rd novel in Perry's Victorian murder mystery series featuring Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police and his wife Hester, Monk must solve a series of brutal, ritualistic murders targeting Hungarian immigrants in London.

A respectable middle-aged Hungarian immigrant is found murdered in his office in a warehouse on the Thames River in the Shadwell area of London. When Monk is summoned to investigate, he finds a gruesome, blood-spattered scene: seventeen candles dipped in the blood of the victim, and horrific wounds but no sign that the victim put up any resistance to his attacker. Monk wonders: did some deed committed in the past finally catch up with him; or could this be the work of an unbalanced mind? Or the result of local resentment and prejudice against foreigners?

An immigrant who is well known in the tight-knit Hungarian community offers to assist Monk and his men by translating for them as they interview those less fluent in English. Monk accepts the help grudgingly, as he suspects the translator hopes to further his own agenda by helping the police with their inquiries.

Suspicion falls on another recent arrival in the community: a doctor fallen upon hard times, who is known to Monk's wife as a colleague tending the wounded and dying during the Crimean War. Himself desperately wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, Fitz has only recently found his way home to England. He speaks fluent Hungarian from the years he spent there after the war. But his own wounds of body and mind have left him struggling with nightmares and blackouts, his nerves in shambles.

Three additional deaths, all identical with the first, has the community on the point of panic. When Fitz is found covered in blood, wandering dazed in the streets, Monk is forced to arrest him to prevent a mob from hanging him on the spot. And Monk cannot be sure Fitz did not commit the murders unless he can prove that someone else did.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Revenge in a Cold River by Anne Perry

An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 286 pages

In this 23rd novel in Perry's Victorian murder mystery series featuring Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police and his wife Hester, Monk must solve a series of brutal, ritualistic murders targeting Hungarian immigrants in London.

A respectable middle-aged Hungarian immigrant is found murdered in his office in a warehouse on the Thames River in the Shadwell area of London.
When Monk is summoned to investigate, he finds a gruesome, blood-spattered scene: seventeen candles dipped in the blood of the victim, and horrific wounds but no sign that the victim put up any resistance to his attacker. Monk wonders: did some deed committed in the past finally catch up with him; or could this be the work of an unbalanced mind? Or the result of local resentment and prejudice against foreigners?

An immigrant who is well known in the tight-knit Hungarian community offers to assist Monk and his men by translating for them as they interview those less fluent in English. Monk accepts the help grudgingly, as he suspects the translator hopes to further his own agenda by helping the police with their inquiries.

Suspicion falls on another recent arrival in the community: a doctor fallen upon hard times, who is known to Monk's wife as a colleague tending the wounded and dying during the Crimean War. Himself desperately wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, Fitz has only recently found his way home to England. He speaks fluent Hungarian from the years he spent there after the war. But his own wounds of body and mind have left him struggling with nightmares and blackouts, his nerves in shambles.

Three additional deaths, all identical with the first, has the community on the point of panic. When Fitz is found covered in blood, wandering dazed in the streets, Monk is forced to arrest him to prevent a mob from hanging him on the spot. And Monk cannot be sure Fitz did not commit the murders unless he can prove that someone else did.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Corridors of the Night by Anne Perry

Corridors of the Night: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 271 pages

This 21st novel in Perry's William Monk series is perhaps not her best effort, but it is a suspenseful tale overall, and fans will enjoy it.  The plot is a little disjointed because there are actually three plots and they seem rather minimally connected.

The principle plot is that involving Monk's wife Hester, who has volunteered to help an old friend from her time as a nurse with Florence Nightengale during the Crimean War.  Her friend is currently nursing at the Roayl Naval Hospital but needs to take some personal leave, and Hester agrees to fill in for her, so that she will have a job to come back to. Hester is working the night shift at the hospital, nursing critically ill or injured naval officers.  She encounters three small children, hidden away in a separate ward, dangerously weak and wasted --- and discovers to her horror, that the two brothers in charge of the hospital, Magnus and Hamilton Rand, have bought the children from their poverty-stricken parents and are using them in experiments to find a cure for "white blood disease" (possibly hemophelia) and other cases of severe blood deficiency caused by disease or injury. When Hester protests, Hamilton Rand kidnaps her along with the children and hides them away in a country cottage where he can continue his efforts to cure a wealthy patient ruthlessly determined to live at any cost.

A secondary plot describes the efforts of Monk and the officers of the Thames River Police to disrupt the gun smuggling trade. Is police corruption to blame when promised backup forces fail to appear at a critical point in the raid, or is it payback for some action lost in Monk's amnesiac past that has put his men at risk? And a third plot line deals with the efforts of Monk and Hester's friend, barrister Sir Oliver Rathbone, to rehabilitate his career and personal life.

Perry is very good at evoking sinister atmosphere and macabre details in this Victiorian thriller.

Click HERE to read the review in Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE for a review from the web site Reviewing the Evidence.

Blood on the Water by Anne Perry

Blood on the Water: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 309 pages

In this twentieth volume in Perry's best-seller William Monk series set in Victorian England, Perry has focused on a situation that will resonate with modern readers: a terrorist attack resulting in the deaths of innocent bystanders. In this instance, Monk, the Commander of the Thames River Police, is an eye witness when a bomb blows up a riverboat pleasure cruise, killing two hundred men, women and children injured by the explosion or trapped in the sinking boat, or drowned in the darkness and confusion despite desperate efforts to rescue survivors. Just before the explosion, Monk himself witnessed a man jump off the ship and saw the man being picked up by a small craft waiting nearby.

Monk and his men have already begun to investigate this lead when he is abruptly informed that because the bombing has political implications, the investigation is being taken over by the Metropolitan Police. It seems this is justified when the new investigators quickly make an arrest: an Egyptian immigrant with an unsavory past and a known grudge against the British occupation of Egypt. The man is quickly tried, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

But when Monk uncovers evidence, while pursuing another case, that shows that the convicted man was somewhere else when the boat exploded, he knows that others must be involved in the crime. The man in prison might have been an accomplice, perhaps was set up to be the scapegoat, but was not the one who placed the bomb and lit the fuse.

With the help of his wife, Hester, with her invaluable contacts in society both high and low; their adopted son, Scuff, with his own intimate knowledge of the River; and their friend the disgraced barrister Sir Oliver Rathbone; Monk doggedly pursues the truth that unknown powerful interests are desperate to obscure, putting at risk not just his own life but Hester's life as well.

Blind Justice by Anne Perry

Blind Justice: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 338 pages

Another great installment in Perry's William Monk series, a tense courtroom drama set amidst the opulance and squalor of midnineteenth century London, where corruption seethes beneath the surface of Victorian propriety.

Hester and Monk undertake to unmask a charismatic preacher who they suspect is milking his gullible congregation for donations to help the needy that are actually going to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself and his family.

They are happy to know that their friend, Sir Oliver Rathbone, newly appointed to the bench, will be presiding at the trial of the Reverand Abel Taft. The prosecution makes a convincing case using the evidence Hester and Monk have collected, but then the defense presents a witness, Robertson Drew, a close associate of Taft's, who sedulously undermines Hester's credibility and the integrity of Taft's victims. Sir Oliver, watching this perversion of justice unfold in his courtroom, rashly decides to intervene. The results are so disastrous they could destroy his career and threaten his life.

Check out this video teaser for Blind Justice: