Review Dark Tide Rising by Anne Perry

 Review of Anne Perry’s Dark Tide Rising

Anne Perry wrote over 100 novels, most of which are in the Crime Fiction genre. She died in 2023. Dark Tide Rising, featuring Thames River Police detective William Monk and his wife Hester, was the last of 18 Monk novels, all of which are set in Victorian London.    

In this one, a wealthy Englishman asks Monk to protect him as he delivers a ransom payment to the kidnappers of his wife. The handover goes south in the treacherous mud tidal flats of the Thames River, and the kidnapped wife is viciously killed. Since Monk’s wife had been involved in a kidnapping in an earlier book, this murder becomes even more personal to the detective.  Did someone under his command betray the plans to deliver the ransom?  Will the revealing of old secrets destroy valued friendships?  Additional deaths tie the plot into more complicated knots.     

Perry writes with practiced authority about 19th-century London. Along with the dark and sinister atmosphere of the Thames River at night, she includes a thematic undercurrent of commentary on the position of women in the era. It is the inclusion of these elements that gives the book a deeper texture than the average detective novel.

I can easily give it a good solid 4 out of 5