2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sudden Fearful Death, October 26, 2009
This review is from: A Sudden, Fearful Death: A William Monk Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)
Anne Perry is amazing. She never seems to run out of ideas that are thought provoking and fascinating. I always look forward to every new book she writes.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
cjm, September 23, 2011
This review is from: A Sudden, Fearful Death: A William Monk Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)
Good Service from this provider. Book came in the condition advertized. Book came quickly. I would purchase from them again.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Often More Of A Social Statement Than A Mystery, May 26, 2011
This review is from: A Sudden, Fearful Death: A William Monk Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)
There's something about the pseudonymous Anne Perry that reminds me of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro of vampiric Saint Germain fame. No, they're not the same person, not at all, but they seem so alike in their hardcore feminist viewpoints and in the resulting characters which exude stiff convictions to the point of unapproachable unfriendliness that they conjoin in my head until they almost do seem the same author.
The first time I read an Anne Perry mystery, I was enthralled; the second time I was still interested; but this third reading experienced proved what I'd suspected about her during the second novel: she repeats situations and gets overt in her social activist commentary. Were she a bit broader in her reach and braver in going out on a limb into terrain she maybe finds personally distasteful (such as making characters that do not share her apparent social views seem less like shallow fools and villains) her books might rightly be called marvels of substance, because in many ways there is a lot of substance to them.
Perry writes well and in fact has courageously liberated herself from conventional rules of punctuation, which I can say without sarcasm I do admire. Occasional anachronistic speech patterns aside ("You know" doesn't sound Victorian when used as it was here) she tells a reasonably enjoyable period story even while her main characters can be unpleasant in and of themselves. (They all seem so rigidly standoffish and selfishly motivated and lacking in tactful politeness, as if asserting themselves was more valuable to them than courtesy.)
As far as authenticity goes, Perry's England of the 1850s is a smorgasbord of contrasts. She makes it clear that hers is no romantic fairy tale landscape. London stinks of oozing drains and unclean gutters, washed by a foul river and nourished by sulfurous rains. On one hand the poor live in squalor we can scarcely fathom, on the other the wealthy are privileged in ways that rankle our precious modern-day egalitarian notions. If withdrawing rooms are always described as prim and immaculate, then she takes pains to make it clear that this is only because of the virtual slave labor of those underclass servants who work under conditions of poverty to keep it so. Women in Perry's books are shown as owning few rights (and mostly accepting this as "how it is"), and aristocrats often conceal hypocrisies that are all but unavoidable in the pre-Darwinian jungle that was Queen Victoria's social straitjacket. All this Ms. Perry does well.
Where Anne Perry slides a bit is in her capacity to lose track of her own story in her quest to drive home how unfair life was in the oft-mythologized England of the 19th century. How many times do we need a lesson in sexual inequality or in the fact that the pressure to hide human failings propelled men and women into becoming contortionists when it came to their lies? I'd love to see this writer lay aside her lesson plan and do what I know she is capable of doing and simply crank out a good old fashion whodunnit steeped in the atmosphere of smog-cloaked London. That would be a great book!
Finally, without giving anything away, may I say the ending of this book disappointed me by its unsatisfactory nature? It was annoyingly truncated and another chapter would have nicely tucked things up. I will add that I do plan on reading Anne Perry again, though, lest anyone find me too hard on her.
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