We have reviewed some books by this author earlier. We have even reviewed some books featuring one of her detectives, Monk. Please see our earlier review of The Twister Root or Cain His Brother for two examples, both featuring Monk. This is the first book in the series where Monk is introduced to us. If you, like me, have been reading the books out of order you already realize that Monk only remembers his life from the point of accident (start of this book as it happens, and everything else is a blur to him)
A man wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is and how he got there. The assistant in the hospital says that the Police was there to see him before he regained consciousness and they said that his name was William Monk.
Runcorn comes and implies that he himself was a cop. Interesting to see how Monk flounders around. He is given his own home address and goes and meets the landlady who shows him to his room – after commenting on how he seems to have ‘lost the key’. He finds some letters from his sister and also the sister’s address. So he goes out of London to see her, stay with her a few days and comes back.
Then he goes to the police station where Runcorn had said that he worked. Still absolutely no recollection of anything in the past.
He gets put on the case of murder of Jocelyn Gray, a younger brother of Lord Shelbourne so there is a lot of pressure on the police to solve the case.
Gray was a wealthy man and was observed by both the street sweeper (of horse dung to keep the streets clean) and the porter to have arrived alone the previous night. The next day he was found dead, beaten to death with a stick like thin instrument – which was his own walking stick. No one was observed to have come in or gone out.
Monk goes to the house of Jocelyn and talks to his mother, his brother and then the wife of the brother. Trying to collect information on what kind of a man Jocelyn was. The picture that emerges is that he had charm and intelligence and was liked by everyone way more than his two brothers.
He meets for the first time, two people who later figure in all of Monk novels. Cassandra Divot first, as a part of the current murder investigation and later, ImogenLatterly in a church. Imogen tells him that he, Monk, had promised to help her in the affair of the murder of her father in law. He remembers nothing of it, of course. Imogen’s sister in law Hester had come over to be with the brother Charles, leaving Crimea where she was assisting Florence Nightingale in looking after the war wounded. She came because both her father and her mother died. It is Hester that frequents later novels.
He then makes progress and identifies the murderer as a heavily clad big man who came into the building on the pretext of meeting another resident, Yeats, and then murdered Jocelyn.
Meanwhile Heather meets and befriends Callandra who offers her a chance to help poor people in London, as she did in Crimea. If you had read a number of Monk books like I have, to go back and see the associations formed afresh is fascinating. Of course, Heather still hates the site of that rude, impolite policeman – as she considers Monk.
Monk finds that Jocelyn’s flat has been trashed – when he goes there to look for any documents he may have missed and this gives him an opening. Knowing that the intruder used fake papers saying that they were the police, he goes through his underworld connections and tries to scoop out the information of who the forger was. He has no memory of the contacts he had and so he spreads word and waits for someone to come to him and it works.
When he goes to the apartment to see if he mas missed anything, he finds it fully ransacked! He continues investigations with Latterleys. In addition, he finds an unscrupulous guy who admits to having sent people to search the apartment for fear that papers showing that Jocelyn had taken a loan from him would be discovered. (He also says that the loan was fully repaid but did not want any association after the murder). The housekeeper, on a second interrogation says that the intruder looked taller when he exited than when he entered and also his eyes seemed to be a different colour. He had a penetrating stare as well. In addition, he identified the caller! Monks soaring hopes were dashed when he found that the man had a very solid alibi during the murder time.
Monk is shocked to discover that he, Monk, was a visitor to Jocelyn Grey’s house and only as he was returning in a hansom did that accident that stole his memory happen. He needs to know if he, Monk, was the killer! And the motive of killing Jocely, if indeed he was.
He admits to Hester that he has lost his memory and Hester helps him by filling in the details of his investigation with Eowyn, her sister in law, before Monk lost his memory. He is told that Hester’s father took his own life because he trusted and admired Jocelyn and sunk a lot of money into his harebrained schemes and lost his shirt. But what made him ‘commit suicide’ is that a lot of his friends had also invested on his urging and lost money and he had lost face. Eowyn Latterly believed that her father in law’s death was not a suicide but Monk, Hester said, was unable to find any evidence of foulplay no matter how hard he had looked.
In the course of his investigations, he comes across how Jocelyn actually connived to cheat his close relatives, how his story about fighting with the Latterly was a con job and even the engraved watch was manufactured! He boasted (and this is a returning memory) that he could have Imogen Latterly any old time he wanted and perhaps he will. Monk also learns that Jocelyn himself never lost a penny in the fraud and he withdrew all his money and more before the collapse.
He confronts Jocelyn who mocks him openly and when Monk throws alcohol in his face, irritating his eyes, tries to hit Monk in rage. They grapple and Monk beats him but remembers leaving him swearing, injured but alive when he leaves.
Suddenly he remembers seeing a face coming the other way. (That person is the murderer without any doubt but I won’t give it away here). He wonders how he can prove his innocence against that person and is more or less sure that he is the one who is going to pay with his life for killing Jocelyn.
How they get the confession with a little help from unexpected quarters is the end of the story and the last few pages are just superb. This is, again, vintage Anne Perry.
You may carp about the detective method used, where key points come back to the memory of Monk – where is the detective work in that? – but all in all, it is a well told story, with the trademark Victorian background and rigid moral fiber of the protagonists. All of these are in almost all of Ann Perrys stories.
A satisfying read indeed.
7/10
— Krishna
bookspluslife 