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But what these unobservant birds

Poodlerat’s book blog

Dark Assassin

May 27, 2008 at 2:40 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense

80. Dark Assassin by Anne Perry (Historical mystery) 308 p.

I’m not really a fan of this series. I like Perry’s Thomas and Charlotte Pitt novels, but William Monk has never appealed to me, and although his wife Hester’s part of the story is always interesting, it’s never prominent enough to carry the book. I found that to be true in Dark Assassin, even though I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

Now an Inspector in the Thames River Police, Monk and some of his men are on the river when they witness a tragedy: a young couple standing on a bridge seem to struggle, then both fall into the water far below and are almost instantly drowned. From their vantage point on the water, in the twilight gloom, neither Monk nor any of his men are sure whether the couple’s fall was suicide or murder.

It soon becomes clear to Monk that whatever the cause of the incident, it is tied up with the apparent suicide of the young woman’s father weeks earlier, and with the sewer construction taking place all over London. Six years earlier, the Great Stink—when the Thames and its tributaries overflowed with raw sewage—turned much of London into a giant cesspit.

Although I appreciate Anne Perry’s mastery in creating a character like Monk, a flawed human being who develops and comes to know himself better with every book, I don’t really like Monk himself, and I don’t take much pleasure in reading about him. I liked Dark Assassin mostly for Hester’s part in it, and for some of the other interesting characters, like Runcorn, Orme, and Scuff. The mystery plot was about average for Perry, good but not spectacular. If you like the Monk series, though, there are a lot of interesting developments; some of them actually made me want to pick up later books in the series, just to see how those ongoing plot lines turned out.

Pages read: 23,557

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Death of a Stranger

January 10, 2008 at 12:18 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Suspense

124. Death of a Stranger by Anne Perry (Historical Mystery) 352 p.

Death of a StrangerIt’s been years since I read A Breach of Promise, but Anne Perry is as talented a writer of historical fiction as I’d remembered. I can’t say William Monk is my favourite of her protagonists, but I like his wife, Hester, quite a bit, and as far as I can tell Anne Perry isn’t capable of writing a bad book. Actually, aside from the fact that I really couldn’t care less about Monk or his mysterious past, I enjoyed Death of a Stranger quite a bit.

When Monk was young, he worked for a while in the railway business before the trial, conviction, and death in prison of his mentor (whom he is convinced was wrongly accused) led to his joining the police. An injury sustained on the job caused amnesia, from which he is still not fully recovered. He knows the most pertinent details about himself, but many incidents from his past life still elude him. When a young woman asks him to look into a railway company, Monk finds many of his memories returning. Unfortunately, the memories he regains seems to point to some wrongdoing on the part of his mentor, or even himself.

Meanwhile, Monk’s wife Hester is running a refuge for prostitutes in Coldbath Square. Trained as a nurse in the Crimea, Hester is able to provide simple medical assistance to women who aren’t able to afford a doctor (and whom a respectable doctor might be reluctant to treat.) When a rich gentleman is found murdered in a local brothel, his family forces the police to come down hard on the area. As business declines, Hester’s patients begin to worry about their livelihoods—and even their lives, since many pimps prove less than understanding about the drop in revenue.

Not a bad novel at all, although my indifference to Monk as a character means this series will never be one of my favourites. I was also a little annoyed by the coincidence of the two plot threads coming together in the end. It’s a common construction in mystery novels with two protagonists who don’t work together to solve cases, and one that I pretty much always dislike. I also thought Monk was an incredible idiot in this book; I saw one incident from the plot coming a mile away, while Monk didn’t recognize it for what it was even after it had happened. Aside from all that, though, it’s still a book well worth reading, even if it isn’t the Anne Perry novel I would recommend.

Books read: 124
Pages read: 36,826

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