Rating: 
Summary: Interesting historical suspense novel.
Review: This was my first Anne Perry novel (audio abridgment). I found it to be entertaining and it moved along quite well.
William Monk is one of Perry's regular characters. Set in Victorian England there is a cast of characters with passionate beliefs and different motivations. I suspected one to be the evil antagonist--but discovered it was not him as the story progressed. (All the clues are not available within an abridgment.)
There were a few interesting twists...and the break from the underwater sequence with Monk kept me on edge.
In the book you embark on a voyage to America coinciding with the beginning of the American Civil War. Hester and William Monk travel by boat on a mission to bring back the run-away daughter of Albertson. Meritt's confused passion for the abolishment of slavery is exhibited as a romantic crush for Lyman...a Northerner bent on purchasing guns from her father-- despite Albertson's continued refusal to sell them to him. Albertson's murder just happens to concide with the gun delivery to Lyman.
The return to England takes you through the trial and the revelation of what actually happens after both Lyman and Meritt are acquitted of wrong doing.
This engaging work will put Anne Perry on my list of authors to explore further.
Rating: 
Summary: My first "go" at the William Monk series
Review: While shelf-browsing my local library, I happened open this book and was intrigued by its attractive cover and its historical premise, so I picked it up.I, too, could not finish the book and stopped short of the trial in London. It opened fairly well with the moral issue of slavery becoming a heated topic at a London merchant's dinner table. The 16-year old daughter is indignant that her father is selling efficiently lethal rifles and ammunition to the Confederacy. Her passion has been influenced by a rival Union arms buyer who pleads the moral case as well, and with whom she later flees to the U.S. I found the characters convincing one moment, and then rather wooden the next. The same with the Victorian milieu -- it struck me as unevenly depicted. For me this was a major flaw as the best historical novels and detective stories have an optimal weaving of story, character and environment to make the "whole cloth", so to speak. In addition, the detective Monk seemed a rather lame chap in this work. Mystery detectives, even when they're not doing much or are hovering in the background, ought to have a looming presence as they are to a greater or lesser degree the moral presence in the story, the one who must discover the truth. The Adam Dalgliesh character of P.D. James is almost always successfully rendered in this way, even though he may be absent for a good part of the story. What went wrong with SoO? Look at the author's extensive credits at the front of the book. Ms. Perry is a "writing machine" if there ever was one, and prolific genre writers can get overextended, disconnected and thin from time to time. That's what happened here, I wager.
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