The Silent Cry (William Monk Series #8)

by Anne Perry

Overview

Deep in London’s dangerous slums, Victorians transact their most secret and shameful business. For a price, a man can procure whatever he wants. But for one such man, the price he pays is his life. In sunless Water Lane, respected solicitor Leighton Duff lies dead, kicked and beaten to death. Beside him is the barely living body of his son, Rhys. The police cannot fathom these brutal assaults until shrewd investigator William Monk, aided by nurse-turned-sleuth Hester Latterly, uncovers a connection between them and a series of rapes and beatings of local prostitutes. But then the case takes an even more shocking turn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345514066
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/28/2010
Series:	William Monk Series , #8
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	86,682
Product dimensions:	7.62(w) x 11.14(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Among Anne Perry's other novels featuring investigator William Monk are Weighed in the Balance, Cain His Brother, and Defend and Betray. She also writes the popular novels featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, including Pentecost Alley, Traitors Gate, The Hyde Park Headsman, Highgate Rise, Ashworth Hall, which was a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Brunswick Gardens. "Her grasp of Victorian character and conscience still astonishes,  said The Cleveland Plain Dealer about the author. Hundreds of thousands of readers agree.

Hometown:

Portmahomack, Ross-shire, U.K

Date of Birth:

October 28, 1938

Place of Birth:

Blackheath, London England

Website:

http://www.anneperry.net

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

[Perry’s] early-Victorian series . . . has deepened and darkened its insights into the social evils that burdened London’s underclasses.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The action careers between the low- and high-born in Victorian society. The denouement is shocking, and the characters are so richly drawn that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.”—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

Although lacking the panache of last year's Weighted in the Balance, William Monk's eighth outing adds to Perry's convincing yet disturbing picture of early Victorian London. Hired to find men whose evening entertainment runs to raping and beating prostitutes in the slum of St. Giles, Monk soon brushes up against murder: Leighton Duff, a respectable solicitor, was found beaten to death in St. Giles, with his son, Rhys Duff, nearby, barely alive. Despite his receiving excellent care from Hester Latterly, the nurse with whom Monk shares a volatile relationship, physical and emotional injuries have reduced Rhys to virtual silence: he can't speak and his hands are broken. Inquiries conducted by Monk and by the police suggest that Rhys was in the right place to beat the women (which interests police not at all) and murder Leighton (which interests them greatly). But, as in other Perry mysteries, it takes more than one perspective to reveal the truth, and Latterly maintains that Rhys, despite his displays of inarticulate rage, is innocent. When Latterly recruits barrister Sir Oliver Rathbone to Rhys's cause, and Sir Oliver naturally hires Monk to gather evidence, the investigator must question what he thinks he knows. Although the young man's silence and the suspicions surrounding him are ultimately resolved and tied neatly into the plot, readers may feel they are bearing the weight of this contrivance like so much overpacked luggage. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Prolific murder-mystery writer Perry has evaded the scientific precision of modern forensic fact-finding by weaving current-day issues and characters into a richly detailed Victorian-era milieu. One man is found murdered and another on the edge of death in the notorious London slum called St. Giles. Although it looks as if they may have engaged in a mortal fight, they are in fact father and son from a well-to-do family. Later, links develop between these men and a series of violent rapes of prostitutes. Hester Latterly, nurse and protector of the surviving son, Rhys, counterbalances detective William Monk in their mutual pursuit of the truth. By the novel's end, revelations of corruption and depravity break through the severe conventions of upper-class Victorian prudery in a dramatic courtroom scene. Perry followers and others will enjoy this new addition. Highly recommended.Michelle Foyt, Fairfield P.L., Ct.

Library Journal

"The brainy, passionate Latterly is good company, as ever."

Washington Post

"Monk is a marvelously dark, brooding creation, driven by his own priate demons."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The action careers between the low-and high-born in Victorian society. The denouncement is shocking, and the characters are so richly drawn that you'll miss them when they're gone."

Los Angeles Times

"Monk and Hester...keep us enthralled with their bold intellectual assaults on the hypocrisy of Victorian moral standards. With her grimly detailed descriptions of the match factories, sweatshops, paupers' hospitals, and tenement 'rookeries' crowded into these slums, Perry brings a rank sense of reality to the wretched living conditions of the working poor... Her early-Victorian series...has deepened and darkened its insights into the social evils that burdened London's underclasses."

NY Times Book Review

"Reads like a firsthand account of the life and customs of that distant time."

Cincinnati Post

It's a long way from sheltered Ebury Street to the disreputable neighborhood of St. Giles, but solicitor Leighton Duff and his son Rhys must have had their reasons for making the journey—though those reasons may never be known, since Duff has been beaten to death in Water Lane, and Rhys, beaten nearly to death himself, can't gesture or speak. What brought the two men to St. Giles? Who beat them so savagely? And what do they have to do with a series of equally brutal rapes of neighborhood factory women moonlighting as prostitutes? Having posed these tantalizing questions and having set Crimean veteran Hester Latterly to nursing Rhys and inquiry agent William Monk on the trail of the rapists, Perry switches gears to mellifluous outrage, railing inertly against the hypocrisies of Victorian gentlemen who insist on proper wives while taking their pleasures wherever they find them, and fuming about the impossibility of winning a prosecution for rape. When the rapes and murder converge with Monk's mounting evidence—evidence indicating that Rhys was one of the rapists and that he killed the father who was trying to stop him—the stage is set for one of Perry's uniquely unconvincing trial scenes. But Hester manages to spring a climactic surprise as stunning as it is unlikely. As overblown as any of Perry's recent historical forays (Weighed in the Balance, 1996, etc.), but fueled by the painful intensity of Rhys Duff's silent cry.

Kirkus Reviews