The Nature of Things

My rating: 2 of 5 stars Anne Perry's William and Hester Monk series is another long-running mystery series that I have read faithfully and with enjoyment over the years. In recent years, it has lost some of its spark and freshness, but it has still been of interest for Perry's unique understanding and exploration of the social ills of the Victorian era in England. This most recent entry, however, just seems stale and repetitive. I couldn't find much to excite my interest. Over the years, we've come to thoroughly know the haunted but ultimately honorable Inspector Monk and his compassionate wife, the nurse Hester. We also know well their friend Oliver Rathbone, the brilliant barrister, now elevated to the bench. Rathbone takes center stage in Blind Justice . Rathbone has only recently become a judge and he has presided over his first case with his usual brilliance. Now he is tasked with a much more difficult case, that of a charismatic minister who is adored by his congr...

You always know what you are going to get with one of Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries: an exploration of the dark underbelly of Victorian society, the secrets that are hidden so well by the glitter and glamour and the stiff upper lips of that high society. The story will be told competently and with empathy for the helpless victims, and, somehow, in the end, justice will be served. All of that is true of  Midnight at Marble Arch.  While it is not her best work, it is a workmanlike effort that held my interest throughout.  In this 28th entry to the Pitt series, Perry takes on the subject of rape, something that she hasn't dealt with much before. She expresses outrage through the voices of her main characters that the women victims of rape are themselves blamed by society for the crime. They are seen as having invited it, of having brought it on themselves. Indeed, it often seems that little has changed in 150 years.  It won't be revealing too much to ...

I have been a fan of Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries for at least twenty years and I've been reading the William Monk series for almost that long. So, by now, Monk and his wife Hester and their friend, the barrister Oliver Rathbone, as well as the coterie of people around them are well-known to me, old friends I might say. This is the 18th entry in the Monk series and I have faithfully read them all. Familiarity breeds...familiarity, in this case. I know very well the way Perry's plots work, and before I was halfway through this book, I had solved the mystery of who the murderer was, although I wasn't completely clear on the motive. But I read these books not so much for the mystery anymore, as for the depictions of the social milieu and Perry's exploration of the dark underbelly lying just beneath the surface of the strictly ordered world of Victorian society. This story takes place in the 1860s and at the heart of it is opium. In the mid-nineteenth century, opium...

I have been reading Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries for so long that there is little mystery left to her stories for me. In this latest Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery, I had surmised by about a hundred pages in who the villain(s) of the piece were going to be. I read the rest of the book in light of my theory, which did, in fact, turn out to be right.  Figuring out the puzzle early on did not necessarily lessen the pleasure of the read. Actually, there is a certain satisfaction in feeling smarter than the "detectives" and I probably smirked all the way through the last third of the book as Pitt finally caught up to me and began to figure things out. This book features most of the characters readers have come to know so well in the previous 26 books in the series. We have the elegant Aunt Vespasia whose society connections always play a role in the solution of the Pitt mysteries. We have the sister Emily and her husband Jack Radley, now a minor official in the Foreign ...

If one created a word cloud for the Anne Perry's latest book, Acceptable Loss , the biggest cloud that would float to the front and center would be "humiliation." Close beside that cloud would be "fear" and "pain." All three of these emotions are perceived through the various characters' eyes, so "eyes" would have a major place in the cloud-orama as well. I've always liked Anne Perry's writing for its social consciousness and its evocation of the period in which it is set, in the case of the William Monk series, the Victorian period in England. Perry is really excellent at describing the horrors of that period, in particular the atrocities committed against women and children while a privileged upper class simply chose to remain oblivious. Indeed, in some instances, the atrocities committed were for the pleasure and amusement of that privileged upper class, as is the case in this book and the previous entry,  Execution Dock . But,...