HALF MOON STREET

Bereft for three weeks of his wife and children, Supt. Thomas Pitt is ripe for the potential international political scandal that

looms when a manacled, bludgeoned male body is found in a punt on the Thames. The problem is that the mystery of the corpse tarted up in a torn green velvet dress and laid out like a parody of Millais’s painting of Ophelia doesn’t seem to be large enough to hold Perry’s attention span for much of the novel, even though the initial setup is intriguing enough. The body is first misidentified as missing French diplomat Henri Bonnard then discovered to be celebrated social photographer Delbert Cathcart. Perry does her usual handy job with the familiar details of Victoriana, including an engaging backstage scene with offstage cameos by Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats. But she spends more time with a melodramatic scandal that haunts Grandmama Mariah Ellison—and with bloated, anachronistic tracts on subjects from women’s freedom (sexual and otherwise) to divorce laws to censorship in the arts to the demoralizing effects of nudie art postcards—than she does in showing Pitt solving his crime. By the time the two stories dovetail in a rather too conveniently plotted resolution, the reader, weary from impassioned discussions of duty, honor, loyalty, longing, and loneliness, may not care who put the body in the punt. For fans of prolific Perry, a comfortably stalwart contribution to the Pitt canon (Bedford Square, 1999, etc.); others might

be better served by starting earlier on. (Author tour)