SLAVES OF OBSESSION

Perry turns from her customary Victorian social issues to the War Between the States when enquiry agent William Monk (The Twisted Root, 1999, etc.) takes on the case of Daniel Alberton. An arms dealer who’s entreated alternately by Confederate naval officer Philo Trace and Union emissary Lyman Breeland (whom Alberton’s daughter Merrit is clearly in love with) to sell the same six thousand muskets and half a million rounds of ammunition, Alberton takes Monk aside after a tempestuous dinner to tell him that he’s being blackmailed by pirates attempting to use a secret from his past to force him into still another alternative deal. Alberton soon foils the blackmail plot by getting killed along with two guards at a warehouse with nary a sign of guns or bullets—or of Breeland or Merrit Alberton. But after bringing the plot to a masterly boil in the opening two chapters, Perry lets it stew till it’s a hopeless muddle. Monk and Hester, departing for America to search for the leading suspect and his ladylove, slog through a heartfelt but pointless recounting of First Manassas, return with their quarry to London, and then settle in for intolerable rounds of rehashing the same old evidence, eventually leading to one of the awkwardly extended courtroom sequences Perry has recently affected before an improbable brainwave leads to the abrupt, helter-skelter climax.

Perry’s unusual and welcome sympathy for both sides of a complex social issue—the Civil War—is undermined by a feeble mystery distinguished only by its length.