Death of a Stranger (William Monk Mystery, Book 13): A dark journey into the seedy underbelly of Victorian society - Softcover

Perry, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747268932 ISBN 13: 9780747268932

Publisher: Headline Paperbacks, 2003

Synopsis

Every night Hester Monk tends to women of the streets who have been injured as a result of their trade. But the injuries are becoming more serious, and now a body has been discovered in one of the area's brothels. The dead man is the respected head of a successful railway company, Nolan Baltimore. With calls for the police to clean up the streets, Hester decides she must intervene to protect these women who stand to lose everything. Meanwhile her husband, William Monk, is investigating a possible fraud at Baltimore and Sons. As Monk endeavours to prevent a serious crime from taking place, he faces some staggering revelations, and finds that the time has come to confront his own demons - even if it means losing all he holds dear...

About this title

Review

Private enquiry agent William Monk is hired to investigate a potential case of fraud in the construction of a new railway line. His client is the fiancée of a man she fears is embroiled in the scheme, and Monk's investigation causes a strange sense of déjà vu--a former policeman afflicted with a case of amnesia concerning his prior life, Monk finds both the case and its milieu unsettlingly familiar. His case is somehow connected to the death of a railway magnate in a sleazy area of London where Monk's wife Hester, a nurse, operates a shelter for abused prostitutes. The women have been doubly victimized by an extortion scheme in which the dead man, who turns out to have been Monk's employer during his "lost" years, may have been involved. More than an ingenious way to fill in Monk's backstory, Anne Perry's newest mystery featuring the enigmatic investigator deepens the reader's understanding of an unusual and compelling protagonist and brings Victorian-era England vividly to life. --Jane Adams

From the Inside Flap

Few authors have written more mesmerizingly about Victorian London than Anne Perry. Readers enter her world with exquisite anticipation, and experience a rich variety of characters and class: aristocrats living in luxury, flower sellers on street corners, ladies of the evening seeking customers on gaslit streets, gentlemen in hansom cabs en route to erotic diversions unknown in their Mayfair mansions. Now Perry gives her myriad fans the book they?ve been waiting for?the novel in which William Monk breaks through the wall of amnesia and discovers at last who he once was.

DEATH OF A STRANGER

For the prostitutes of Leather Lane, nurse Hester Monk?s clinic is a lifeline, providing medicine, food, and a modicum of peace?especially welcome since lately their ailments have escalated from bruises and fevers to broken bones and knife wounds. At the moment, however, the mysterious death of railway magnate Nolan Baltimore in a sleazy neighborhood brothel overshadows all else. Whether he fell or was pushed, the shocking question in everyone?s mind is: What was such a pillar of respectability doing in a seedy place of sin?

Meanwhile, brilliant private investigator William Monk acquires a new client, a mysterious beauty who asks him to ascertain beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not her fiancé, an executive in Nolan Baltimore?s thriving railway firm, has become enmeshed in fraudulent practices that could ruin him.

As Hester ventures into violent streets to learn who is responsible for the brutal abuse of her patients, Monk embarks upon a journey into the English countryside, where the last rails are being laid for a new line. But the sight of tracks stretching into the distance revives memories once stripped from his consciousness by amnesia?as a past almost impossible to bear returns, eerily paralleling a fresh tragedy that has already begun its inexorable unfolding.

Edition details

• Publisher: Headline Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747268932
• ISBN 13: 9780747268932
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384