Half Moon Street, Anne Perry

 The Book

When Charlotte Pitt goes to France with her sister Emily, Pitt is left alone to fend for himself. It's been a long time since his bachelor days and he is out of practice. He thinks his work will help him keep his mind off of Charlotte, but it doesn't. He misses her, and he misses sharing his work with her. When the body of a young man nominally matching the description of a missing French diplomat is discovered floating in a boat, dressed in a green dress, and placed in an obscene pose, Pitt is called in to investigate. By the time Pitt establishes it is definitely not the diplomat, the locals don't want such a messy case, and Pitt is left to pursue it on his own. 

He quickly discovers the body belongs to a missing photographer, a man who was making his name photographing the upper middle classes, especially the artistic ones. The artist is working in similar circles as Pitt's mother-in-law, Caroline Fielding, wife of the Jewish actor Joshua Fielding, a man 16 years her junior. Pitt likes her and her new husband, and goes out with them a couple of times while Charlotte and Emily are away. But any help Caroline might have given Pitt is taken up by meeting her late first husband's half brother, Samuel Ellison. Caroline's mother-in-law Mariah is deeply afraid that Samuel will tell the world why his mother's marriage ended. And so, Mariah keeps Caroline busy through lies and deceit. 

Meanwhile, Pitt and Tellman keep pursuing leads until they discover their high minded photographer made a lot of money selling pornographic photos. And when they find the a batch of the photos in a shop on Half Moon Street, they finally know who killed the poor soul, and why. 

My Thoughts

The All About Agatha podcast kept repeating in their early days how rereading certain novels, even if Kemper or Katherine hadn't read them in decades, had little things they remembered. And with this book, I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement. I could not have told you what book the B plot twist was in, but I did remember every, single, aspect of it. Just nothing of the main plot. I had no idea who killed the photographer, and I worked it out by knowing Anne Perry's style and nothing about the plot twist. 

I also think this book has the weakest link to geography to date. Perry clearly decided this was how she was going to ground her books in the Victorian Era. Now some 15 or more books into the series, she couldn't let it go. In fact, by the end, the mystery to me was when would Half Moon Street show up in the narrative. 

All in all, a pretty good puzzle mystery, if you don't mind extremely dark themes about family secrets. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

This book came to me from the Evanston public library. It is a first edition hardback, which entered their library system on April 21, 2000. This book is showing its age. The spine has received some sort of damage, so the book sits lopsided. The protective plastic cover is showing it's age. It seems the book was well read when it was released, having been checked out at least 30 times between release date and the day they put the new return date sticky note in the front. It was checked out another seven times between July of 2002 and Feb of 2008, after which all of the checkouts were done solely on the computer. While I understand the convivence of a computer system, inevitably reading copies of these older books reminds me how much data has been lost to the general public. Now I have to guess if the book I check out is popular, back in the day, I used to know. There is tape over the cover where the price is located, so I can't tell what the final two digits are in the price. I would look it up on the receipt, but I had this book at my parents' house when I was there last month, and it seems I left my checkout receipt there. Therefore I have had to dig for this information. Publisher's Weekly assures me that the release price was $25.00, this is the price we will use. 

This Book                                                     $25.00

Items Reviewed This Year                          $426.95

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