Very interesting beginning with Monk waking up in a hospital not knowing who he is. He goes back to work and has to hide his loss of memory from everyone while solving a case he was working before the accident. He meets Hester Latterly (his future wife) during the investigation. It was kind of slow and repetitious. ( )

The first William Monk, and the story of how he lost his memory. It's a credit to Anne Perry that I read others without knowing the backstory, and they didn't suffer for it.The mystery itself was a sidelight - not enough attention paid to it for me to care much. But it would have been difficult for there to be a mystery that was not overshadowed by the story of Monk discovering himself. ( )

Habe nur Die Russische Gräfin gelesen und war nicht sonderlich begeistert, da reichte eins aus dem Doppelband. Zuviel Zufall und Beschreibungen ( )

A great series debut. I've always liked the thoughtful and hard-hitting aspects of the Monk mysteries from Perry as opposed to the lighter Pitts. The mystery is well written and affecting, with the consequences and emotional damage of the crimes clearly spelled out. Monk's a great character, asking hard questions about his past as a man he discovers was capable, clever, and something of an abrasive, cold jerk, his present as he struggles to find his feet again, and his future as the man he realizes that he hopes to become. Hester is an excellent heroine and a great companion/foil to Monk, with courage and adventures of her own. Their romance starts here on a sharp note, and the concluding lines to their mutually acid-tongued first meeting are still among some of my favorite lines in fiction. ( )

This is the first novel in Anne Perry's William Monk mystery series, set in Victorian London. I enjoy all Perry's mysteries, but I think this is the best. It's about a policeman who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia, the result of a blow to the head he suffered during the course of a murder investigation. His pride will not allow him to admit to his superiors or colleagues that he has lost his memory, so he must now conduct a multi-layered investigation, finding out what he learned in his previous investigation, as well as continuing it. He must also reconstruct who he is by piecing together various clues about his past. As he discovers more, he begins to suspect that the person he is would not have liked the person he that was. He wonders, even, whether the person he was might have been capable of murder. This is a tense and suspenseful mystery, but the aspect of the novel I most enjoyed was the psychological process of Monk discovering and coming to terms with himself.