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As the icy waters of the Thames claimed the lives of two Londoners, Inspector William Monk could not be sure, as it played out before his horrified eyes, what he really saw. He watched helplessly from his River Police vessel as the bodies of a young man and woman tumbled from the bridge. No one knows better the unreliability of eyewitness accounts than a policeman. Now, Monk is confronting his own uncertainty. Could the couple have been arguing and lost their balance? Was the man trying to toss her over, or did he try to save her and she pulled him over with her? Even Monk's subordinates who watched along with him do not agree on the details.
The police do know, however, that whatever happened, the new sewer construction seems to be at the center of it. The young woman's father worked deep in the tunnels for a company owned by her fiance's family. The word on the street is that the tunnels got to him, he couldn't take it any longer and he shot himself. But at the time of his demise, he was looking into the safety of the construction. A fortune stood to be made from the huge project, so if someone was making ripples, unscrupulous big business interests wouldn't hesitate to eliminate the "problem." And the daughter took up the cause where her father left off. Did she find out something that her betrothed was attempting to hide? Maybe the same thing her father had found out?
As the truth slowly comes to light through a great number of interviews --- both Monk's and Hester's, with a little help from their friends --- all three deaths start to smell fishy. And as for the sewers, well, the whitewashed reports of no serious injuries need to be reexamined, or the term "serious injuries" must be redefined. Tunnel work has never been rated among the safest occupations, so the optimistic lack of casualties smacks of a disturbing cover-up. Delving into the underground unearths a fiendish killer, and the deadly chase begins. If Monk doesn't watch every step, he may fall prey to the killer or, possibly worse, the tunnels themselves.
Anne Perry has created an extraordinary pair of sleuths: Hester, Monk's headstrong wife, a nurse who can boast of having worked with Florence Nightingale, and Monk himself, a superb investigator and a man of quiet strength, surprised by his passion for a woman of such fierce opinions. Their interactions with the Victorian world of 1860s London show the extent of society's evolution over the past 150 years.
Written convincingly in period prose and dialect, DARK ASSASSIN is a lively tale filled with action, compassion and, of course, mystery.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
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