Rating: 
Summary: Good Victorian Novel, Mediocre Mystery
Review: This is the first "Monk" mystery-novel I've read, and if I return to them it will be as novels. The psychological introspection of the two main characters is harrowing. The confining social atmosphere is terrifically realized, although Monk and Rathbone are perhaps too modern in their PC attitudes. The author so convincingly evokes Victorian conventional morality that neither I nor the blinkered protagonists ever guessed the surprise that is so appropriately at the core of this novel. In an artfully constructed plot, the "real" mystery arrives late in a rather tedious trial, when least expected. This is a memorable novel of interior mystery rather than action. I would have understood the characters' romancing more if I had started earlier in the series. If there's a flaw in the book, it may be an excess of feeling, of emotional flagellation--particularly in comparison to Bruce Alexander's similar Sir John Fielding series--and what seems a criminal dearth of legal preparation on the part of Rathbone (or is that typical of Vic. lawyers, Ms. Perry?). The agonizing sleuthing actually wins too easily, then romance triumphs, and the book ends with no satisfyingly clever resolution. Maybe Perry couldn't figure out proof of the villain's legal culpability? (Did anyone else think the architecture of Melville was modelled on Frank Lloyd Wright's? I actually thought Perry might have Melville escape to America and somehow, ah, influence his mother!)
Rating: 
Summary: A Breach of Promise
Review: This latest in Perry's series about Monk and Hester Latterly continues the personal thread of their relationship along with a tantalizing mystery so well set in Victorian England that you can feel and smell the story! Go back and read every one of the books in this series!
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