This will be short and brutal, but, I’m sorry, I think that’s all this book deserves. Just finished A Sudden, Fearful Death, by Anne Perry. It’s a Wiiliam Monk novel, the first of the series that I’ve read. Also the last. The paperback was 439 pages long, of which a little over 50 were actual mystery, a similar amount was interesting atmosphere and characterization, and the rest long, repeated semi-lectures about how terrible it was to be a woman in the 1850’s. She got her point across effectively early on, but she didn’t let having done so stop her. The constantly repeated refrain got old, quickly.

I picked this up because I liked the Pitt novels, but here her preoccupation with telling me I wouldn’t want to be a woman in 1850 really got in the way. After 40 or 50 pages of it, I got the point, I understood it, and wasn’t interested in repeating the lecture. As if all the preaching wasn’t enough, the major characters all misinterpret a piece of evidence, the true meaning of which is patently obvious, not for just a little while, but for nearly 200 pages! And don’t try to tell me it was because they lived in such a repressive time that no one could conceive of the correct interpretation. At least two of the major characters said the thought out loud, in contexts other than this piece of evidence. They could conceive of it, they just didn’t. Maybe that bit was intentional, an auctorial gift so I could feel smugly superior to those nasty boys who repressed women so badly. If so, it failed miserably. It merely made me not want to waste my time with any more in this series.