Presented to: Anne Perry
For: The Sins of the Wolf
Anne Perry's Victorian mystery The Sins of the Wolf calls out for a fireplace, a long winter's night, and a reader with the pleasure of time. The matriarch of a prominent Edinburgh family has been poisoned and her nurse charged. But it soon becomes clear that mother has been murdered by one of her own children, or one of their spouses. This is then a novel about family values, albeit with an unsettling twist. With invention and skill, Perry leads her reader along the convoluted path to truth, revealing at each turn the myriad secrets and evasions around which this extended family is structured. Near the novel's end, the nurse heroine and her detective friend find themselves literally locked in a secret room hidden within the family's publishing establishment, the center of a lawless and deceiving enterprise guarded by the family's aloof and respectable public face.
No easy, happy view of family life here, but neither a picture without parallel moments of grace and dignity and love. All this good, if harrowing, fun served up against the richly-drawn backdrop of Victorian London and Edinburgh (complete with testimony at the sensational trial by Florence Nightingale). And throughout, Perry weaves in lures about earlier stories and future prospects for nurse and detective. Closing the pages of The Sins of the Wolf, a reader can only find herself on the way to the bookstore and more Anne Perry.