[In the following review, Boyle attributes many of the problems of Perry's A Sudden, Fearful Death, to its unfocused protagonist William Monk.]

Anne Perry has published more than a dozen crime novels set in Victorian England. Her labors have brought her a wide readership and a certain beyond-the-genre literary distinction. A Sudden, Fearful Death is the fourth in a series whose nominal hero is William Monk, a police officer who left the London force under an unspecified cloud to set up shop as one of the first private detectives. He is subsidized by Lady Callandra Daviot, an unkempt widow of means and good intentions, whose only requirement is that Monk disclose to her some of the details of his adventures in the demimonde.

In the early pages of the novel, Monk is summoned to investigate the rape of a respectable young woman in her family's backyard. With little legwork or concrete evidence, Monk solves the case summarily. The remainder of the novel concerns the mystery of the fatal strangling of an educated and ambitious nurse who had served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea (the time of the action is 1857, a year after the end of that war). This investigation is carried out not only by Monk but also by the regular police, with amateur turns provided by Lady Callandra and another Crimeaveteran nurse.

Unfortunately, A Sudden, Fearful Death is a miasma of narrative infelicities that makes one yearn for a revival of the real Victorian practitioners of unreadable melodrama—Bulwer-Lytton, say, or Mrs. Henry Wood. Much of its difficulty seems centered on the unfocused character of Monk, who, we are told early on, had been in a recent accident "and woken … knowing nothing of himself at all, not even his name. Certainly it was the crack to his head which had brought it on, but as fragments of memory had returned, snatches here and there, there was still a black horror which held most of it from him, a dread of learning the unbearable…. He still felt a dark fear about things he might yet discover."

A detective with a shattered memory who thinks in overheated, equally shattered prose is a most unpromising guide through a suspense thriller. Moreover, the mystery of Monk's "dark fear" of his past is never resolved in the book, leaving one to wonder why it is introduced at all. This absence of development is reflected in a larger way in the minimal sense of any movement toward a solution to the central crime, the murder of the nurse, until, deus ex machina, an innocent—and apparently extremely stupid—woman remembers in the closing pages that she has in her possession letters that will identify with certainty not only villain but motive and finally bring to an end the interminable investigation and climactic trial.

Nor are such lines and situations anomalies in this novel. Barely a page goes by without another example of grammatical and narrative incoherence, as if the text has been constructed as a kind of mirror image of Monk's identity crisis. Frequently the dialogue and expository passages seem to have been constructed by two different, noncommunicating intelligences. A serious question is posed by a detective, usually "dryly"; the respondent then comes back with a remark accompanied by an inexplicable smile or some other puzzling display of humor—puzzling considering the gravity of the situation, and since none of these facial tics lead to any revelation of character or advancement of the plot. ("Monk smiled with a downturn of the corners of his mouth," an act that, after considerable experimentation, proves physically impossible.)

It would seem that Ms. Perry (and her editors) have set out to satisfy two of the most enduring—and most base—of the undiscriminating reader's desires. These are the provision of speciously significant information, which makes the lazy reader feel educated without requiring him actually to learn anything, and, secondly, the illusion of having one's social consciousness raised, giving complacency to couch potatoes.

So, yes, as the plot grinds on we are exposed to patches of the social history of Victorian England, about as much as can be garnered in a half-hour of documentary television. Yes, the streets were cesspools and the hospitals breeding grounds of disease and the methods of the regular police (and forensic science) rudimentary at best.

And, yes, again, the sensitive and au courant subjects of women's rights and abortion are raised, indeed are essential to the final explanation of the killing. But anyone looking in these pages for enlightenment will be disappointed. Ms. Perry's ultimate message is as hopelessly muddled as Monk's memory.