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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.

The headlines were gruesome: two beautiful women found strangled in the studio of a well-known London artist. To investigator William Monk and his wife Hester, the murders are a nightmare. One of the victims is an obscure artist's model. The other is the wife of Hester's cherished colleague, distinguished surgeon Dr. Kristian Beck, a Viennese emigre who swiftly becomes the principal suspect.

When Countess Zorah Rostova asks London barrister Sir Oliver Rathbone to defend her against a charge of slander, he is astonished to find himself accepting. For, without a shred of evidence, the countess insists that the prince of her small German principality was murdered by his wife, the woman who was responsible for his exile twenty years before.

When a brilliant young architect suddenly ends his engagement to a socially prominent woman, her outraged parents file a sensational breach of promise suit. But the case comes to a tragic halt when a murderer strikes. Sleuth William Monk investigates.

With each new novel, Anne Perry adds striking dimensions to the architecture of her fiction, building with inspired imagination a many-layered world of rich and poor, nobility and degradation. "She lifts the lace curtain from Victorian society, " Sharyn McCrumb has said, "to reveal its shocking secrets."

In his family life Angus Stonefield had been gentle and loving, in business a man of probity, and in his relationship with his twin brother, Caleb, a virtual saint. Now Angus is missing, and it appears more than possible that Caleb—a creature long since abandoned to depravity—has murdered him. Hired to solve the mystery, William Monk puts himself in Angus’s shoes, searching for clues to the missing man’s fate and his vicious brother’s whereabouts.

Nurse Hester Latterly finds herself well-suited for the position: accompany Mrs. Mary Farraline, an elderly Scottish lady with delicate health, on a short train trip to London. Yet Hester's simple job takes a grave turn when the woman dies during the night. And when a postmortem examination of the body reveals a lethal dose of medicine, Hester is charged with murder--punishable by execution.

Deep in London's filthy, dangerous slums, Victorians transacted their most secret and shameful business. For a price, a man could procure whatever he wanted, but it happened now and then that the price he paid was his life. Now, in sunless Water Lane, respected solicitor Leighton Duff lies dead, kicked and beaten to death. Beside him lies the barely living body of his son, Rhys.