Customer Reviews

Cardington Crescent

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the first mystery in the Pitt series, the Ellison family lost a daughter to the Cater Street Hangman. Since that time friends have suffered unspeakable tragedies, and now Emily Ellison March, Lady Ashworth, is suspected of murdering her husband George by putting belladonna in his morning coffee. Families with this kind of luck need to have someone married to a police detective!

If you are reading the stories chronologically, you will have followed the relationship of George and Emily through several novels. While I was initially sad to think his good-natured presence would be missing from future stories, I have to confess that there was little spark between the two. Maybe a change of pace is what Emily (and Perry's loyal readers?) need.

Charlotte (Emily's sister) and Thomas Pitt continue to develop as characters and sleuths in this story. Charlotte is even beginning to learn a bit of judicious caution and investigative skills! While the solution to the mystery was not entirely surprising, the twists and turns of the plot take the reader into some interesting and unforgettable aspects of late Victorian England. I highly recommend this book, and even if this is the first one you read you will enjoy getting to know the characters.

George March, Lord Ashworth, married Emily Ellison, Charlotte Pitt's sister. While the Ashworths are visiting his extended family, he dies from poison in his morning coffee. As he was the only one in the family who drank coffee, it obviously wasn't an accidental death. The Marches are ready to close ranks against Emily, who had been seething at George over his gratuitous attention toward a cousin's wife at the opera the night before. As far as they're concerned, she's just a woman scorned, and an outsider--so better she hang than one of them. But do you think Charlotte will stand for that for one minute? Not a chance. . . The Marches are what 100 years later we refer to as a dysfunctional family. Some things never change. . .have fun reading

The customer "reviews" of this book are plot summaries which will spoil a potential reader's enjoyment. This is the best Anne Perry I've read so far (I've read about ten.) As usual, it exposes Victorian crimes against the poor and rebellion against one's own class by a few of the wealthy. But, in addition, Perry this time crafts several middle of the night, suspenseful horror scenes.

I'm often let down by Perry's endings. Not enough analysis/explanation is provided, and only the principals are allowed to react to the denouement.

I would like to see a chronological listing of her books. If you read them out of order, too much about earlier happenings is revealed. I knew, for example, that ____ could not have been the murderer in this book because he is alive and well in a LATER book which I had already read. Also, another character's death (from an earlier book) is referred to repeatedly.

I still love the Victorian settings and a glimpse into the rigid lifestyle and the grinding poverty of that time.

I have been reading the Pitt series in order from the beginning, and this is the best one yet. They are all good reading, but this one in particular offers the classic English mansion who-done-it feel. I highly recommend this series, but do read them in order. A complete ordered list can be found on the author's website, anneperry.net.

I've been skipping around a bit in reading this series, so some of the events in this eighth novel in the series I was already aware of, as part of the back-story in later episodes. Again, most of the action takes place within the extended family of Charlotte Pitt, wife of Inspector Thomas Pitt, one of Victorian London's finest. Where Charlotte married down, her sister, Emily, married up, to Lord George Ashworth. The Ashworths are paying an extended visit to his maternal relations, the Marches, and Emily is in agony over the attentions her infatuated husband is paying to the wife of one of his cousins, while ignoring her. But then George is found poisoned one morning, and it quickly becomes apparent that one of the eight family members (including Emily) must be the guilty party -- but which one? And then a second, connected murder takes place in the house, and family loyalties require that Emily take the blame. Or perhaps it was the only other outsider, Jack Radley, who is there for inspection as a possible suitor for the youngest daughter of the family. The story involves the gradual paring down of the list of suspects, largely through the efforts of Charlotte, who has come to keep her distraught sister company. This part of the narrative is quite good, but the author makes a strategic error in introducing a completely separate murder mystery at the very beginning, and then ignoring it entirely until the very end of the book, when she manages to weave it into the larger mystery. A pretty good story, though, especially (as always) in its portrayal of the suffocating strictures of Victorian Society, especially as regards women.

Being an Anne Perry fan I was disappointed in this mystery. It is the 8th in the Pitt series, and by far the least interesting. I don't know if I didn't like it because there wasn't much about Charlotte and Thomas and their children or what. Perry just seemed to rattle on with too many details. I hope the 9th book is better.

I have read all of Anne Perry's novels in the Monk series (which I enjoyed tremendously) and four of the Pitt series (which I didn't like). Cardington Crescent is the worse. As usual the author spends a lot of time letting the reader know the opinions of the characters as to who was responsible for the murder, and then she abruptly (in the last 2 or 3 pages) ended the story by having one character reveal the murderer but not why he did it. (Thomas and Charlotte Pitt made some cryptic remarks about the reasons for the murder, but I couldn't figure out what they meant.) As in the other Pitt novels, the focus was on Charlotte Pitt and her silly sister rather than Thomas (who is the police inspector) and their "investigation" into the murder. Why Anne Perry focuses in on them is a mystery to me. Why didn't she let Thomas do the work? As in the Monk series, Anne Perry's characters in the Pitt series live in a world where most of the murders are connected to the characters and their social circle. Why? In the four Pitt novels, Anne Perry builds a very interesting story and then it seems like she gets bored and abruptly ends the story in the last 2 or 3 pages. Because of this, I have decided to stop reading the Pitt series and to not read anymore of Anne Perry's books.

Thomas Pitt of the London police finds the case sickening, despite his years of experience with horrific crimes. A woman's body has been cut into pieces, wrapped up in parcels, and left in various locations in the part of London called Bloomington. This could be an impossible case to solve, and Pitt knows this from the start. Meanwhile, in the well-to-do Cardington Crescent neighborhood, Pitt's sister-in-law Emily - who married as far above her birth as Pitt's wife, Charlotte, married below it - is staying with her husband's relatives for a month. Lord George Ashworth is humiliating and frustrating Emily with his open interest in Sybilla March, wife of a cousin and daughter-in-law of the house's widowed and self-satisfied owner, Eustace March. Also staying there is George's beloved Aunt Vespacia, mother of Eustace March's late wife. Soon George Ashworth dies from poison in his breakfast coffee - a beverage that no one else prefers, so there can have been no mistake on the poisoner's part. Emily soon finds herself assumed by her host, and perhaps by most of the others living in the house, to have killed George out of jealousy. Emily did not do this. She knows it, of course; and so does her sister Charlotte, who soon arrives to care for her. That is Charlotte's only known reason for moving in and getting acquainted with the Marches and their other guests; but it puts Inspector Pitt's wife, who loves nothing better than to help him with cases involving Society, right where she needs to be to conduct her own investigation. For she must protect Emily. Not only from the real possibility of being wrongly convicted and hanged or at least locked away for the rest of her life; but also from a handsome, well-born, but poor man named Jack Radley, who is also a guest of Eustace March and who was already flirting with the beautiful young Lady Ashworth before George died. Did Radley kill her husband in hopes of marrying the Ashworth fortune, which now comes to Emily?

As the above paragraph shows, there's a lot going on in this novel of crime and guilt in Victorian England. Author Perry delves as usual into the ways a murder investigation disrupts lives and reveals secrets, including secrets that have nothing to do with the crime - but that come to light anyway, to the embarrassment of those involved. Both Pitts have plenty of "stage time," which for me always makes the read more enjoyable. The lesser characters, also as usual, come to vivid life and quickly engage the reader's sympathy. My only quibble is Perry's uncharacteristic reluctance, at the mystery's resolution, to call the actual murderer's reason for the crime by its name. She writes around the word in a manner that makes me suspect an editor did not allow her to use it in the novel's final draft, since in later books she displays no such qualms.

For that I certainly won't reduce the number of stars in this review. Times change. With them, so do publishing standards. I'd rather not have to infer something easily talked about today, but I remember how it was 20 and more years ago; and there's nothing Perry can do now about how it was back then, to write about Victorian society's seamy side.

--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of 2005 science fiction EPPIE winner "Regs"

Three stars for a plot which seesaws between two seemingly disparate murders, five stars for its engaging story, characters, and sense of historical place, including Charlotte and Emily, and Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould who play major roles.

Cardington Crescent is the eighth book in Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series of historical mysteries. The main story takes place in June 1887. George and Emily are staying with his relations, Eustace March in Cardington Crescent when George is murdered. Pitt is called in to investigate. Emily, the prime suspect calls for her sister, Charlotte, and she helps Thomas with the investigation. The murder is solved at the end of the novel, but not before another murder is committed. As with the other Pitt novels, the theme of Victorian hypocrisy, injustice, and mistreatment, especially of women and children is flawlessly portrayed.

However the book begins with another murder, seemingly unrelated to George March's murder, and not mentioned again until late in the book. The willful dog of a passerby discovers human remains by the side of a churchyard in Bloomsbury, hacked and bleeding and tied up in grease paper. After Pitt's initial attempts to discover the victim's identity and murderer, the incident is dropped, not picked up until late in the novel when a clue discovered during the March murder investigation, leads to the solution of the Bloomsbury murders, and, helps to unveil the Cardington Crescent killer. This disjointed plot was mildly puzzling, but did not distract me enough to stop reading. Without hesitation, I recommend the book to all who love the Pitt series.

I usually love Anne Perry's books but this one seemed like it could have used some editing. It was quite repetitive and took too long to move forward on some key plot points. The reader was good, so the problem wasn't with her.