I reviewed Anne Perry’s first William Monk mystery here. This one, A Dangerous Mourning, is similar: a woman is stabbed to death in the home of her upper class Victorian family. No one could have possibly gotten out of the house after the murder, so the murderer is one of the family or the servants. In the last novel, Detective Monk worked to solve a mystery while struggling with amnesia after an accident. Little by little memories come back to him, but he spends much […]

When Anne Perry, the author of The Face of a Stranger—the first book in her Detective William Monk series—was fifteen years old, she and her friend murdered the friend’s mother by bludgeoning her to death. She spent five years in prison and was released. As an adult, under the pseudonym Anne Perry, she began writing historical murder mysteries set in the Victorian era. Her true identity was eventually discovered after a movie, Heavenly Creatures, came out about the murder. This did not affect her success, […]