Praise for Anne Perry and her mysteries:

“Give her a good murder and a shameful social evil, and Anne Perry can write a Victorian mystery that would make Dickens’s eyes pop.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Perry has the great gift of making it all seem immediate and very much alive.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

When it comes to a Victorian mystery, author Anne Perry has proven that nobody can re-create this period — its manners and morality, fashions and foibles — as masterfully as she. Like the great Victorian novelists whose mantle she wears so well, Perry conjures up the majesty and mayhem of the British Empire at its brilliant zenith. Perry’s novels continually hit bestseller lists around the country, and Brunswick Gardens, her newest Thomas and Charlotte Pitt adventure, is sure to be no exception.

A century ago, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution ignited the civilized world, and the outraged Anglican Church took especially strong offense. In Brunswick Gardens, Perry creates an imaginative microcosm of this incendiary debate. In a mansion in London’s affluent Brunswick Gardens, the battle is waged between the most respected Anglican clergyman, Reverend Ramsey Parmenter, and his beautiful assistant, Unity Bellwood, whose aggressive Darwinism and “new woman” feminism leaves Parmenter continually incensed.

When Unity, three months pregnant, is discovered dead at the bottom of the Parmenter staircase, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt are called in to investigate. Thomas Pitt, the commander of the Bow Street police station, is certain that one of the three pious men in the house committed the murder. Was it Reverend Parmenter, handsome curate Dominic Corde (whom readers may remember from Perry’s first book, The Cater Street Hangman), or Parmenter’s Roman Catholic son? Powerful forces demand that the scandal be cleared up at once — but this mystery may not be so easily untangled, and Thomas and Charlotte Pitt will settle for nothing less than the truth…and justice.

Like Perry’s many other mysteries, Brunswick Gardens translates weighty moral issues into deeply moving human dramas. Perhaps her most psychologically penetrating novel yet, Brunswick Gardens is a distinguished addition to her acclaimed body of work.

Publishers Weekly

The 18th case for turn-of-the-century London policeman Thomas Pitt offers Perry’s guaranteed entertainment, although without the full depth of last year’s Ashworth Hall. Now in command of the Bow Street station, Pitt is sent to the home of prominent vicar and scholar Ramsay Parmenter, where a young woman has died in a suspicious fall down the stairs. Unity Bellwood was as adept at irritating others as she was at her work of translating ancient texts with the reverend. Pitt faces the awkward possibility that the dead woman was pushed by Parmenter himself; by Parmenter’s intense son, Mallory, who is annoying his Anglican father by studying to become a Catholic priest; or by Dominic Corde, a curate who lives in the house. Complicating issues is the fact that Dominic, the widowed husband of Pitt’s wife Charlotte’s dead sister, is an elegant former wastrel with whom Charlotte was once infatuated. As Pitt probes “all the little sins” of the household, he discovers secrets that several of his suspects have failed to confess about themselves and about Unity. Meanwhile Charlotte, drawn to visit Dominic, witnesses social interactions among the family group that her husband, in his official capacity, could not observe. Within this clearly drawn cast, the face of the villain begins to emerge even before Pitt is called in on a second death in the household and closes in on the crimes’ solution.

Publish Date : 1999