Rating: 
Summary: expected more
Review: I'm a big fan of Perry's Monk and Pitt series, so I had high expectations for this first entry in a projected 5 volume series. Unfortunately the principle characters are nowhere near as compelling as William and Hester Monk or Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. The supposedly highly intelligent Reavleys overlook obvious paths of investigation and in general are blind to the emotions that motivate people to act -- until the very end when Joseph Reavley pulls a rabbit out of the hat to explain who killed whom. Furthermore, the conspiracy that sets things in motion remains offstage. The chief conspirator makes a couple of brief appearances that presumably serve to foreshadow his role as the Reavleys' nemesis in the future. But he is such a nonentity here that it's difficult to get excited about future volumes in the series. I'll probably read them -- but I'll also wait for the paperback rather than shelling out for the hardback.
Rating: 
Summary: Sad letdown for a Perry reader
Review: I'm glad I read this book via my public library and didn't buy it. I'm a long-time reader of Anne Perry's Pitt and Monk series, and usually find her books to be engrossing, solidly plotted, and generally populated with well-drawn characters.However, I hope this is *not* the beginning of a new Perry series. I hate to think she would be spending any more time on this instead of devoting it to another entry into the Monk or Pitt chronicles! I should have known this book was a bad idea, because the opening scene is a cricket match, yes, complete with details of a game in this complex arcane sport which is a complete mystery to Americans like me. Slogging through the first few pages, splashed liberally as they were with incomprehensible cricket minutiae, I right away learned that the characters are flimsy paper cutouts, the plot is pure dross featuring (yawn!) Top Secret Papers Which Reveal Treason at the Highest National Level, and I could not get interested enough to keep on reading past the first 30 pages. I flipped to the last few pages to find out about the Top Secret Papers and then turned the book back in. Sorry, Ms. Perry, but this was a sad letdown for a devoted reader of your wonderful Victorian mysteries - and as the holder of a BA in History, I personally find the WWI era more interesting than the Victorian era.
Rating:
Summary: Y-A-W-N
Review: If you want a lesson...heck, a series of lessons...in how NOT to write a novel, take this book to your novel discussion group. Like the slow motion car crash that opens the work, one reads on, unable to look away from one artistic horror after another. Leaden characters, endless repetition, sickenly twee and lofty descriptions of Cambridge, inexplicable plot developments, superfluous references,characters and plot material, heavy-handed foreshadowing and more foreshadowing. I can only conclude that Anne Perry's editors are laughing at us all over their champagne glasses, laying private bets on just how bad her books have to be before they stop selling. I wonder just how many more of these monstrosities (the book jacket threatens a further FOUR in this WWI based series) will actually make it into production.
Ghastly, ghastly book...and perhaps the worst part of it is the "teaser" first chapter of the sequel. It is truly, truly awful. Save yourself some money and misery and pass on this dreadful "bestseller".
Rating: 
Summary: Great
Review: In 1914 in Cambridge, England, Professor and Chaplain Joseph Reavley attends a cricket match when his Intelligence Officer brother Matthew arrives to inform him that their parents died in an automobile accident. Stunned by their deaths, Joseph has no time to mourn as Matthew also tells him that their father had a document that if placed in the wrong hands would defame their country and probably destroy England at a time when the continent is one step away from open hostilities. Matthew insists that Joseph assist him in recovering the document that he believes cost their parents their lives as their father was bringing this flaming gun to him when the car crashed. Feeling unsure of himself as he is an academian in a pacifist leaning university, Joseph joins his sibling when he learns of the death of a student that may be tied to this mess. Anne Perry, known for her Victorian mysteries, provides readers with a tremendous World War I espionage who-done-it thriller. The clever story line is filled with action and fully developed characters so that the audience follows a strong spy murder mystery while receiving a savory taste of England at a point when NO GRAVES AS YET caused by the "war to end all wars" had occurred. Ms. Perry opens her new series in glorious victory. Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: Well written mystery about a fascinating historical period
Review: In the last days before the outbreak of World War I, England lives in denial. Surely England will not be driven into a war about an Austrian assassination. Surely the bankers will prevent a war that could destroy civilization and be bad for business. Some, though, are taking more active steps--steps designed to ensure the peace no matter what the cost. When John Reavley gets his hands on a secret document that, according to him, would destroy all English honor, he contacts his son in British Intelligence and sets off to meet him. But John and his wife Alys are killed in an apparent accident before they arrive. Sons Mathew and Joseph are left with the mystery of what happened to their parents, what happened to the document, and what secret could really be so destructive to the world. Joseph returns to his job as a lecturer at Cambridge University where one of his students is found dead--murdered in his room. Now Joseph has two mysteries to investigate. Oddly, however, the two seem connected. To Joseph, the dead student had seemed a bright beacon for the future, but as he digs deeper, he learns that Sebastian might have stooped to blackmail, intentional cruelty, and stealing another student's girlfriend. Any of those could justify murder, but could they explain the apparently cold-blooded death? Author Anne Perry's writing evokes an era when the British class system was still in flower, yet when the world is at the cusp of launching into one of the most destructive wars of all time. Her strong narrative style involves the reader, making us care about the characters, especially Joseph, and his attempts to reconcile his faith with the evil that happens. Perry relies a bit too heavily on coincidence and never explains how John Reavley ended up with such a critical document, but most readers will be willing to overlook these flaws due to the interesting picture of the past that Perry delivers.
Rating:
Summary: Consider it on its own terms
Review: It somewhat dismays me that some of the readers' reviews for this book seem to be more concerned with comparing it to the author's Pitt series rather than evaluating it on its own terms. I'm sure the Pitt books were very good, but the fact remains that Anne Perry has chosen to move on. Nostalgia for that series should not cause No Graves As Yet to be treated more harshly than otherwise would be the case.
In any event, I found No Graves As Yet to be a good if not outstanding work. The author's strongest point is her ability to capture a time and place so well with what's usually a fairly brief description. Consider the opening paragraph: "It was a golden afternoon in late June, a perfect day for cricket. The sky burned in a cloudless sky, and the breeze was barely sufficient to stir the slender, pale skirts of the women as they stood on the grass at Fenner's Field, parasols in hand. The men, in white flannels, were relaxed and smiling." I'm not a particularly imaginative sort, yet I had no trouble at all picturing myself at a Cambridge cricket field in 1914, thanks to just three descriptive sentences. Other examples of terse yet vivid descriptions abound throughout the book. Ms. Perry also does a fine job at portraying the atmosphere of fear and suspicion pervading the college where much of the action occurs, as well as the apprehension - often expressed through denial - of upcoming war.
As for the story itself, it was a reasonably interesting mystery with the requisite number of twists and turns, though things were thrown at us very quickly near the end, making for some confusion. I had to re-read the last chapter just to make sure I had it right. Ms. Perry also was able to blend in a little bit of history into the story without making it all seem contrived.
One weakness of the book was that some of the characters were not as well-developed as might be expected, with the singular excepton of Joseph Reavely. We never quite learned as much about his brother Matthew as we would have wanted, though this may be remedied in future books in the series. It also was difficult keeping track of some secondary characters, especially the acquaintances of the deceased John Reavley. But these are minor flaws, and I consider this book to merit a 4 out of 5.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant and Evocative Page-Turner
Review: It's always seemed odd to me that no one has given the 'Great War' the same kind of fictional attention that has been lavished upon World War II and the American Civil War. Drawing from her own family records, Anne Perry proposes to remedy that deficiency. If "No Graves As Yet" is indicative of the caliber of the four volumes still to come, this quintet may well become her masterwork. We will be following the fortunes of one English family, the Reavley siblings - Joseph (our hero), Matthew, Hannah and Judith - from that last halcyon summer of 1914 thru the horrors and devastation of World War I until the Armistice is finally signed in 1918. "No Graves As Yet" introduces these central characters in a thrilling, stand-alone story that is as tightly plotted and emotionally/intellectually challenging a mystery as any of her previous books. When the novel opens, their parents have both been killed in an automobile accident, and their grieving children...especially Joseph, the eldest (a professor of Biblical languages at Cambridge) and Matthew, an officer in the British Intelligence Service...find themselves confronted with a peculiar puzzle. Before his car inexplicably went off the road and crashed, Reavley senior was on his way to consult Matthew professionally (something he would not normally do) about a mysterious document that had somehow come into his possession which he claimed would disgrace the British Empire and could destroy the civilized world. That document is nowhere to be found in the wreckage, and the 'fortuitous' car accident suddenly becomes horrifically suspect. Subsequent events quickly convince the two brothers that unknown, powerful forces who will stop at nothing to recover the manuscript are behind their parents' deaths, thus impelling them to somehow get to it first themselves for fear of they know not what. While storm clouds gather in Serbia after the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand, Jospeth sustains another, equally personal loss: one of his most brilliant and beloved students is brutally murdered on campus. As Matthew follows an elusive trail chasing the document, Joseph finds himself enmeshed in a criminal investigation where nothing...not friendship nor position nor avowed morality...can be taken at face value. Inevitably the two plot threads intertwine, and the utterly logical yet brutally chilling denouement is a shocker. For anyone who is as captivated by Anne Perry's writing as I am, it's easy to simply assume that the qualities which make her books so addictive will be present in anything new that she chooses to publish: exciting storytelling with a 'twist'...here, the surprising whereabouts of the document...which always leaves you thoroughly satisfied; characters whom you can genuinely care about and identify with, and vivid, evocative world-building that recreates whatever historical period she has chosen in your mind's eye as if it were here-and-now. It's no surprise to me that "No Graves As Yet" embodied ALL of these literary nuances. However, what stunned and delighted me about this special novel was what I can only call the utter beauty and lyricism of its style. I don't think Ms. Perry's ever written on this level before, and some of its passages left me aching for an England-lost-to-time which I love and have loved for so long. My only regret? There will apparently be a year between novels, and that's TOO LONG!
Rating:
Summary: Tedious Nonsense
Review: It's difficult to believe that the author who produces the Thomas Pitt series could have written No Graves As Yet. The suspense is supposed to involve a momentous document which can affect the fate of nations about to embark on World War I. A preposterous document of that nature does finally emerge after 300+ pages on which several uninteresting characters engage in a few murders and suicides. Matthew as a British intelligence officer is perhaps the least credible character in this poorly researched story. Periodically a line or two reminds the reader that the nations of Europe are preparing for mass slaughter. Please, Miss Perry, go back to Pitt and Monk.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't get past the fourth chapter...
Review: Like many others, I loved the William Monk books and eagerly awaited Perry's new series. What a disappointment. The writing was trite and predictable, and the opening entirely too "English" for American readers. The characters never grabbed me. I never cared about their lives. I feel a twinge of guilt for giving up.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Not what I expected from Anne Perry. I love her Monk and Pitt novels and was looking forward to this one. If this had been by "Jane Doe" I might have given it 4 stars, but I was really disappointed. When an aothor abandons a teriffic series (i.e., when Patricia Cornwell dropped Kay Scapetta and wrote that HORRIBLE "Isle of Dogs" ) readers don't get what they were expecting. Sorry, Anne, go back to the Victorian age.
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