Amazon.com (ISBN 0804117934, Mass Market Paperback)

Readers of Anne Perry's series of Victorian murder mysteries know that her novels are as much social histories as crime stories. She pens her tales with an acute eye for period detail and a strong moral outrage at the hypocrisies and miseries of life in 19th-century England. Mysteries featuring Inspector Thomas Pitt and his upper-class wife, Charlotte, explore the life of the middle class and aristocracy; those that center on William Monk illuminate the back alleys and pauper's hospitals of England's lower classes. In The Silent Cry, Monk and his friend Hester Latterly, an independent young woman inured to life's horrors by her nursing service during the Crimean War, investigate the murder of prostitutes in Seven Dials. As always, Perry's grim landscape of tenements, sweatshops, and boozing kens becomes almost as much a character as the living people who inhabit them, while Monk and Hester's rebellious intelligence and unconventionality keep us coming back for more.