The Sins of the Wolf, Anne Perry

 The Book

    Hester Latterly accepts a position as a traveling nurse to accompany an elderly lady, Mrs. Mary Farraline from Edinburgh, Scotland to London to see her youngest daughter. Mary is going because her daughter is pregnant, and about to give birth to her first child. So Hester, between private nursing jobs, and unable and unwilling to work in a hospital setting, decides to take advantage of her freedom and do a little bit of traveling. She has a long, overnight train ride from London to Edinburgh and arrives very tired. She find the Farralines to be an ordinary, self made family, with a few not very serious squabbles. But her time there is short. Before long she is packed onto the train, and she and Mary chug away towards London. 

As the night deepens, she and Mary talk about their travels, their experiences of army life, since Mary's late husband, Hamish, had been a captain and in the Battle of Waterloo when they were newly married. Hester enjoys the conversation, but before long it is time to sleep. Hester gives Mary her dose of medicine and then they both go to sleep. 

Hester, having not slept the night before, sleeps soundly through the night, only to discover that Mary is dead upon waking up. As bad as it is, the situation for Hester gets worse, when Hester finds someone has hidden a valuable piece of jewelry in her personal effects. It can only be Mary's. But before Hester can return it, she is arrested for the murder of Mary Farraline.

Brilliant and ruthless detective, William Monk, and equally brilliant but cerebral Oliver Rathbone both pledge to help her to the best of their abilities. Good friend Callandra Daviot agrees to foot the bill for Hester's defense. So Monk heads off to Scotland, while Rathbone tries to mount a defense of Hester. But when the case is shifted to Scotland, Rathbone finds his skills are useless, and he cannot defend Hester.

Meanwhile, Monk is trying to figure out which scoundrel of the Farraline family would kill to keep their secrets? One of the sons, the corrupt Prosecutor Fiscal Alastair, or the wayward Kenneth head over heels for his mistress who is bleeding him dry. Or is it one of the daughters, the beautiful Eilish, who is believed to be flighty and lazy, and who may or may not be having an affair with her sister's Ooonah's husband? Or Oonah herself, the cool architect of hiring Hester so she would be oh so convenient to blame so she can finally run the company? Uncle Hector knows one of them did, but he's not sober enough to help. 

Monk, despite his hard work, cannot figure out who killed Mary. They work with Scottish lawyer James Argyll to give Hester a fair trial. Argyll is very good at his job, but the verdict comes in "not proved." Now unless the trio figures out who actually killed Mary, Hester will never work again. 

My Thoughts

    This is my favorite Anne Perry book. It's the one where Rathbone, Monk and Hester all must face what they feel about each other. And where Hester and Monk finally figure out what the rest of the world has figured out long ago, the two of them are in love. It also revolves around a tight-knit family, and their utter moral rot.  Hester chooses to take this job, but in reality she should have been skeptical. Yes, the advertisement looks fun. But this is a rich family, who could have just sent a maid along. So why didn't they? Why were they willing to hire someone to travel with Mary? 

The fact that Hester doesn't ask these questions, despite her intelligence and moreover her professional involvement with Monk, is a little bit hard to understand. But of course, we the reader know to be skeptical. It should not surprise us that Hester is arrested for the murder, indeed, we would be poor readers indeed not to have expected it. But Perry always plays fairly with her reader, even going so far as to tell us who is going to murder Mary, even as Hester and Mary are saying goodbye to the family. From dinner to the last farewell on the train platform, we are given to understand that this family is going to kill their mother.  If we read the text closely enough, if we understand what is happening inside the murder's head. We can only guess at the motives at this stage, but a good reader should be able to pick out who the murderer is. And yet, having likeable characters do horrific things, having unlikeable characters turn out to be honest people, these are the themes of Perry's work. 

I have to wonder if part of Perry's point is that the reason we dislike a lot of people is because we see reflected in them our own short-comings. If we are impatient with other people's weaknesses, we miss out on the good things they have to offer. She definitely treats some weaknesses as worthy of patience and others of condemnation. It is our job to understand if a weakness is just human frailty or moral rot. We need to have compassion, understanding, forgiveness and honesty to deal with frailty, moral rot should be excised as fast a possible. 

Monk is a deeply flawed hero, who tries every day of his life, from his accident forward to become a more admirable man. Hester's flaws are more complicated, and reflect more deeply on the misogynistic box Perry found hard to escape. Rathbone's shortcomings are of conceit and distance. And yet, this family reflects these flaws back to us, showing how much darker each side could be. 

In this book Perry has taken us to the very heights of her powers as an author, encapsulating one of the best moments in her cannon. It is hard to believe, since this book was released in September of 1994 and Heavenly Creatures was released in June 1994 that this book could have been edited after the revelation of her past had come to light. In this sense, we must look to see how her work changes afterwards. 

How her life changed, how her career changed is well documented. Her sales went through the roof. It is, after all, not the first time someone notorious had penned a novel. This of Byron, think of Oliver Wilde, think of Dashiell Hammet or Agatha Christie. Humans are complicated,  The press never got tired of hearing her say she was sorry for her part in the murder of Norah Reiper. There were those who never believed she was truly sorry for what she had done. Those who were appalled that she wrote novels at all. 

But even way back in the day of 1979, it wasn't easy to become a novelist. She was 39 before she was ever given the chance. Her juvenilia was ripped apart by learned scholars, saying she had no literary prowess. But by the time Heavenly Creatures was released, she was already a best selling author in field. She had a strong following, and was receiving critical acclaim. And yet, those people were wrong. 

What I think we can take away from it is that humans are complicated. We all overlook or excuse flaws in our friends and family. And we are all overly critical of the same. I just like what I like. And I will continue to like it.

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

    This book entered my library on Sept, 21, 1994 is a first edition from my library. And for being nearly 30 years old, is still holding up. But we are coming to the natural end of this book's lifecycle. It has been well read. The binding of the 374 page book book is coming unglued. Pages have been taped together to make this book last longer, but it won't survive much longer, if at all after I return it. It's sad, because this book is such a piece of history. In 1994, advances were rising. And this book was priced before her publisher knew they could make an enormous profit off of it. The cover says it sold for $21.50. 

This Book                                                                        $21.50

Items Reviewed This Year                                            $980.82

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