William Monk

About the William Monk series

William Monk opens on total disorientation: Inspector Monk wakes in a London hospital in 1856 with no memory of who he is, only the outward evidence of who he was -- a reputation among Metropolitan Police colleagues for ruthless brilliance and very few friends. He hides the amnesia and returns to work, forced to reconstruct his own past case by case, one buried resentment at a time, while the mystery of an unsolved investigation that may implicate Monk himself hangs over the opening books. Anne Perry uses the amnesia as a genuinely sustained structural device, not just a hook: Monk's uncertainty about his own moral character -- was he a good man before the accident? -- runs underneath the Victorian murder plots for years of the series.

He's partnered, in shifting configurations, by two people: Hester Latterly, a blunt, unclubbable Crimean War nursing veteran who becomes his professional ally and eventually his wife; and Oliver Rathbone, a barrister whose courtroom skill resolves many of the series' cases and whose personal entanglement with Hester complicates the central trio for books at a stretch. Perry's Victorian London is meticulously researched and often bleak, with cases reaching into asylums, the opium trade, dockside crime and the era's rigid class and gender lines, and the plots frequently hinge on Monk's investigative method: patient, procedural, and willing to implicate people society protects.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Face of a Stranger (1990), is essential here in a way it isn't for many mystery series -- Monk's amnesia and his slow recovery of fragments of his past, his marriage to Hester, and his later career move from private inquiry agent to Thames River Police commander all build cumulatively and are frequently referenced as settled history in later books. Skipping around risks meeting Monk mid-marriage, or mid-Thames-Police-command, without the professional and personal history that got him there. The series also runs in the same story-world as Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, set roughly a generation earlier in Victorian London, but the two series follow unconnected characters and can be read in either order relative to each other.