|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Unlike previous William Monk novels by Anne Perry, BLIND JUSTICE follows Oliver Rathbone's legal career when he is elevated to the bench as judge. He feels honored to be judge. It crowns his career as barrister.
Meanwhile, at her hospital for fallen women, Hester finds that one of the volunteers is in distress over her father's debts. Her father has given all his family's money money to a church—and Hester begins to smell a rat. With the adopted mudlark, Scuff, she visits the Nonconformist church, chatting wholeheartedly with the minister Abel Taft and his wife, both of whom are dressed to the nines. She earnestly discusses the mission of Christian giving with Taft's assistant, Robertson Drew. Of course, Hester is acting as detective, and her work sets into motion a trial in which the churchmen must answer a charge of fraud in Sir Oliver's courtroom.
Rathbone, however, in his eagerness to stop the fraudulent impoverishment of churchgoers, oversteps his bounds as a judge. He is put in jail, and through him, we see what it must be like to have had, and then, to have had not. The rest of the novel concerns Rathbone's trial and Hester and Monk's attempts to discover what really happened at the church and whether Rathbone had been set up.
Alas, all is not well. Perry's power in the Monk novel series has been to carry readers into the keen mind of master detectives, Monk and Hester, to allow readers to sightsee in Victorian London, and to follow brilliant barrister Rathbone in the prosecution of wrongdoers. However, Monk, chief of the water police, is not supposed to enter a house where all the evidence lies. Rathbone cannot prosecute or plan a trial because he is in jail. Although the premise of the novel displays Perry's usual brilliance, this reviewer feels that her publisher demanded a page count that she had to reach before submitting the manuscript. The plot does not thicken, it plods.
This reviewer sends a plea to publishers to foster the art of writing and avoid lukewarm reviews: the art of writing over the page count, please!
§ Cathy Downs, is Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville; her Ph.D. is in American literature. On the side, she is a longtime fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, September 2013
This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
