Try a different kind of mystery. Anne Perry’s mysteries deal with seemingly contemporary problems--rape, abortion, sodomy--but in a Victorian atmosphere.
If you like Inspector Morse, you will probably like William Monk, ex-police officer turned private eye. You will wonder about his past as he does. You will also find his side-kick, Hester Latterly, who nursed the wounded in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale, a delightfully “modern” woman.
In A Sudden Fearful Death, the two of them are tracking down the killer of Prudence Barrymore, a young upper-class woman who has been working as a nurse (not considered a suitable profession for her!). Was her murderer her gentleman friend? One of the doctors? Or, is there a villain lurking around the hospital preying on the nurses? When all of the tangled threads of the case unravel, you will discover a social statement that many Victorian women would have liked to make if they had any legal status, rather than being considered chattel.
The author knows her way around the courtroom as well as the drawing room. She lives in Scotland and has also written a mystery series involving Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. The other William Monk mysteries are The Face of a Stranger, A Dangerous Mourning, and Defend and Betray.
