Blood on the Water – Anne Perry

It’s 1856 and Victorian London is riding high: the city is dominant on the international stage, its empire is expanding and England is enjoying an age of unprecedented progress.

William Monk is head of the River Police, when the city is stunned by an act of terror; an explosion on board a packed Thames pleasure boat, with many lives lost. An Egyptian is arrested and sentenced to hang and it seems justice has been done.  As Monk and his wife Hester investigate, they start to doubt that the man being held is really the one with so much blood on his hands. Could there be a conspiracy at work? For some, there’s certainly an awful lot to lose.

Anne Perry is a prolific and critically acclaimed historical author, specialising in character-led fiction and the exploration of contemporaneous social and ethical issues. As she says herself: “A good writer can give you a multitude of lives.”

She’s perhaps best known for the William Monk series; Blood on the Water being the twentieth instalment since his debut in The Face of a Stranger (1990)

Her first published novel was The Cater Street Hangman (1979), featuring Victorian policeman Thomas Pitt and his wife Charlotte.  Interestingly, it’s been said that the Thomas Pitt novels may be the longest sustained crime series by a living writer – his most recent story was Midnight at Marble Arch, published nearly thirty-five years later in 2013.

Anne Perry is also the author of a successful First World War series and a number of festival Christmas novellas.  She was selected as one of The Times’ twentieth century 100 Masters of Crime and now lives in Scotland.