Pentecost Alley - Hardcover

Perry, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449906353 ISBN 13: 9780449906354

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Synopsis

The ritual murder of a prostitute named Ada McKinley in a bedroom on decrepit Pentecost Alley would ordinarily occasion no stir in Victoria's great metropolis. But under the victim's body the police find a Hellfire Club badge inscribed with the name Finlay Fitzjames--a name that instantly draws Superintendent Thomas Pitt into the case.

Finlay's father--immensely wealthy, powerful, and dangerous--refuses to consider the possibility that his son has been in Ada McKinley's bed. The implication is clear: Pitt is to arrest someone other than Finlay Fitzjames for Ada's demise.

But Thomas Pitt is not a man to be intimidated, and with the help of his quick-witted wife, Charlotte, and her well-connected friends, he stubbornly pursues his investigation--one that twists and turns like London's own ancient streets....

Anne Perry has devised the most intricate mystery of her prolific career in PENTECOST ALLEY, whose brilliant resolution will astonish and satisfy even the most discerning.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Perry is the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Death on Blackheath and Midnight at Marble Arch, and the William Monk novels, including Blood on the Water and Blind Justice. She is also the author of a series of five World War I novels, as well as twelve holiday novels, most recently A New York Christmas, and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Ottoman Empire. Anne Perry lives in Los Angeles and Scotland.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Superintendent Thomas Pitt's rise to commander of the Bow Street station has carried him above the sordid run of London crime, but when Whitechapel prostitute Ada McKinley is tortured and strangled two years after the reign of Jack the Ripper, a cufflink and a button from the defunct Hellfire Club on the scene make the case sensitive enough to bring in Pitt. Both articles are traced to Finlay FitzJames, a young diplomat whose wealthy, ruthless father Augustus's massive contempt for Pitt and his mission casts his son in an even more suspicious light. Pitt, keenly aware of the pressure to arrest someone else, is relieved when his own wife Charlotte and her sister Emily Radley, insinuating themselves into the confidence of Finlay's sister Tallulah, uncover an alibi Finlay cannot make public--and even more relieved when he extracts a confession from a pimp that seems to close the case. A trial follows, as well as a speedy execution--and then, to Pitt's horror, there's a second murder exactly like the first, linked to Finlay by still another scrap of haberdashery. If Finlay is innocent, who is so determined to incriminate him? And if he's guilty, how can Pitt bring him to book when he's being ridiculed all over town for hanging the wrong man? Repetitious and yet perfunctory in probing the suspects; and bits of the truth, at least, are obvious from the beginning. Still, the mystification, and the intensity of Pitt's dilemma, are genuine. Altogether, Perry's best book since Defend and Betray (1992). (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0449906353
• ISBN 13: 9780449906354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 405