75. Half Moon Street by Anne Perry (Historical mystery) 311 p.

This is, hands down, one of the very best mystery novels I’ve ever read. I’ve complained before about having put together important pieces of the puzzle before the characters in other Anne Perry novels, but that wasn’t a problem in this book. I was hooked from the beginning, and I didn’t put it down until the end.

Superintendent Thomas Pitt of Bow Street Station investigates some of the most sensitive crimes in Victorian London. When a man’s body, dressed in a green gown and laid out in a boat in a suggestive pose, is found floating down the Thames, Pitt is the natural person to handle the investigation.

Meanwhile, Pitt’s mother-in-law, Caroline, is finding that marriage to a Jewish actor seventeen years her junior has even more difficulties than she anticipated, while her first husband’s mother, Mariah Ellison, finds her peace threatened by a relative from America.

I didn’t see the ending coming at all, even though it arose naturally from everything that came before it. I adored the interaction between Caroline and Mariah, and the revelations about Mariah’s past.

Anne Perry investigates real moral issues in her fiction, without applying today’s values. She never writes as though the outcome were already decided, even when it is, from our point of view. She never patronizes her characters, and that’s part of what makes her historical writing so effective and believable.

Pages read: 21,771

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Anne Perry, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt