The great port of London is churning with activity in Anne Perry’s latest Victorian mystery, An Echo of Murder... The horridly mutilated victim is a Hungarian merchant, one of a growing populace of displaced persons fleeing oppression in European cities like Budapest and Vienna, only to stir up antagonism in their new home ... Perry fashions a rich, if blood-splattered narrative from this chapter of history.
...imagine these same people being strategically slain just because they are different by a faceless and nameless killer or killers working through some sadistic agenda. It sounds like I could be describing race and immigration relations in almost any large country today. However, these are the elements at the center of Anne Perry's latest Victorian-era mystery, An Echo of Murder ... This being an Anne Perry novel, it is no surprise that this interesting storyline will soon merge with Monk's to further confound her readers ... Fans of the series will remember that Monk has his own challenges, having lost his entire memory prior to a coach accident just after the Crimean War ... An Echo of Murder speaks directly to current real-world issues and does so in the guise of another solid Victorian-era mystery.
Perry has outdone herself with this extraordinary entry in the long-standing Monk series. An unexpected conclusion with courtroom drama makes for fascinating reading ... One can only hope there are more books to come in this exceptional series. The finely written characters are worth each word ... Commander Monk of the Thames River Police is faced with one of the most gruesome murders of his illustrious career.
Cmdr. William Monk, of the Thames River Police, is faced with a series of murders among Shadwell’s Hungarian circle as sanguinary as they are ritualistic ... If Hungarian immigrants have not completely integrated into London’s larger community by 1870, their history in the city is marked more by peaceful separatism than strife. But that sense of peace is shattered by pharmacist Antal Dobokai’s discovery of the body of widowed Imrus Fodor in the warehouse he owned on Shadwell Dock—a crime whose location calls Monk... The ensuing trial produces no notable twists before a denouement whose last-minute arrival masks its essential lack of surprise. Lesser work from a sometime master, less striking for its echoes of a Victorian past than for its previsions of a xenophobic future marked on both sides by distrust and fear.
Set in the summer of 1870, bestseller Perry’s skillful 23rd William Monk novel (after 2016’s Revenge in a Cold River) opens with the Thames River Police commander’s arrival at a riverfront warehouse, where Hungarian businessman Imrus Fodor lies dead, impaled by a bayonet ... The victim’s enigmatic countryman, Antal Dobokai, who discovered the body, serves as translator as Monk investigates London’s close-knit Hungarian community. Leads are few, until identical murders occur ... Though the book’s final quarter feels rushed, Perry smoothly intertwines themes — war’s lingering cost, tensions around immigration and otherness — that challenge in both her period and our own ...gritty depictions of Victorian medicine at home and on the battlefield ground the story in wrenching realism.
