Anne Perry’s books always remind me of why I started reading historical crime in the first place: a love of detective stories, and a curiosity to find out how this was done before modern police methods made it easier. This is a quintessential example of that, managing to convey a good feeling of the period while being 100% pure detective story. Perry is a mistress at giving her stories a sense of mounting tension, as the reader finds out more about the case clue by clue, distracted by red herrings and finally stunned by more than one surprise. It is not a series that cannot change and grow either; at one stage it was becoming rather too cozy and even a shade repetitive, but now Pitt is in Special Branch the tension is back. Perhaps there is nothing new about another dead prostitute - quite the opposite - but with a writer of this caliber while I was reading the book I was not aware of anything but the chase to find out whodunit. Long may Ms Perry continue to show us how it is done.