Silent Cry (William Monk Novels) - Hardcover

Perry, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449908488 ISBN 13: 9780449908488

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1997

Synopsis

No author since Dickens has captured the shadow side of Victoria's England as masterfully as Anne Perry. In The Silent Cry, she once again exposes the particular vices spawned by an age renowned for its virtues and reforms. And our able guide is investigator William Monk, "the dark and brooding hero who infuses this luxuriantly detailed series with its romantic soul" (The New York Times Book Review).

Deep in London's filthy, dangerous slums, Victorians transacted their most secret and shameful business. For a price, a man could procure whatever he wanted, but it happened now and then that the price he paid was his life.

Now, in sunless Water Lane, respected solicitor Leighton Duff lies dead, kicked and beaten to death. Beside him lies the barely living body of his son, Rhys. The police cannot fathom these brutal assaults, until shrewd investigator William Monk uncovers a connection between them and a series of rapes and beatings of local prostitutes. Then it begins to seem shockingly clear that young Rhys Duff must have killed his own father.

In a heartstopping courtroom drama, the Crown's case against Rhys Duff, accused of patricide, begins its inexorable unfolding. With it Anne Perry adds another haunting chapter to her magnificent recreation of a bygone era.

About this title

Review:

Readers of Anne Perry's series of Victorian murder mysteries know that her novels are as much social histories as crime stories. She pens her tales with an acute eye for period detail and a strong moral outrage at the hypocrisies and miseries of life in 19th-century England. Mysteries featuring Inspector Thomas Pitt and his upper-class wife, Charlotte, explore the life of the middle class and aristocracy; those that center on William Monk illuminate the back alleys and pauper's hospitals of England's lower classes. In The Silent Cry, Monk and his friend Hester Latterly, an independent young woman inured to life's horrors by her nursing service during the Crimean War, investigate the murder of prostitutes in Seven Dials. As always, Perry's grim landscape of tenements, sweatshops, and boozing kens becomes almost as much a character as the living people who inhabit them, while Monk and Hester's rebellious intelligence and unconventionality keep us coming back for more.

About the Author:

Among Anne Perry's other novels featuring investigator William Monk are Cain His Brother, Defend and Betray, and most recently Weighed in the Balance. She also writes the popular novels featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, including Pentecost Alley, Traitors Gate, The Hyde Park Headsman, Highgate Rise, and Ashworth Hall, which was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. "Her grasp of Victorian character and conscience still astonishes," said The Cleveland Plain Dealer about the author. Hundreds of thousands of readers agree.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0449908488
• ISBN 13: 9780449908488
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 361