Corridors of the Night

August 3, 2015
More thriller than mystery, Perry’s melodramatic 21st William Monk Victorian historical (after 2014’s Blood on the Water) focuses on the Thames River policeman’s wife, Hester, a skilled nurse tested in battle during the Crimean War. While filling in for a friend on the night shift at an annex to Greenwich Hospital, Hester encounters a terrified six-year-old girl, Maggie, who pleads with Hester to help her gravely ill seven-year-old brother, Charlie. When Hester sees the slight lad, she’s shocked by his condition and pessimistic about his chances of survival. Her efforts to rehydrate Charlie buy him some time, but her knowledge that a doctor has been routinely drawing blood from him, Maggie, and their four-year-old brother, Mike, places her liberty and her life in jeopardy. The identity of the person behind the blood-letting is no secret, and a logic flaw undermines the serious moral debate that’s at the heart of this lesser effort. Agent: Donald Maass, Donald Maass Literary Agency.

April 15, 2015

In the 21st installment of this New York Times best-selling series, overweeningly ambitious doctor Magnus Rand and his chemist brother, Hamilton, want to crown their careers by discovering a cure for "white-blood disease" (e.g., leukemia). When nurse Hester Monk comes across three children they're using for experiments, she is also imprisoned, setting off a desperate search by her husband, William, commander of the Thames River Police.

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September 15, 2015
Perry's Monk mysteries, set in Victorian London, have two powerful protagonists in Commander Monk and his wife, Hester. They also have two points of enormous interest: Hester's nursing work with the London poor and Monk's encounters with all the criminal flotsam under his purview with the Thames River Police. In this, the twenty-first in the series, Hester's work uncovers a secret and deadly practice. She stumbles upon several children, one of whom is near death, seemingly abandoned in the labyrinth of the hospital in which she works. The medical treatment of these children connects in a disturbing way to the contrasting treatment she next witnesses of a very wealthy man. Then Hester is kidnapped, and Monk must try to reconstruct what she found out, which leads to the question of why there are secret graves on the rich man's estate. The medical practice at the heart of this mystery shines a light on the exploitation of the poor, a favorite and compelling theme of Perry's. On the other hand, she can be awfully long-winded, but the absorbing chase at the heart of this tale will carry readers through.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)