rd
Squa
re by 
Anne Perryrd Square by Anne PerryAs with 
all of Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt
novels,I am delighted with Bedford Square. I love reading mysteries and especially about either Victorian (or Regency) En ugland. Her books are clean with no vulgar language and I appreciate this. Theyhare some of the best mysteries I have read and I have read quite a few.
Judy Moughon
The sociomoral theme for today, boys and girls, is reputation: How to build a good public one and how to maintain it in the face of blackmail, given people's tendency to believe anything bad they read in the newspapers about public figures. It begins with a body being discovered on the doorstep of General Balantyne, whose family figured in two earlier books in the series. Exactly why it's there is never satisfactorily explained, but Superintendent Pitt gradually uncovers a web of blackmail threats which the victims would find it almost impossible to disprove, set as they are in the professional pasts of a number of gentlemen. It's never quite clear, either, why the gentlemen in question would reveal these particular incidents to anyone else, and in such detail, in casual conversations at the club. The reader is unlikely to figure out whodunit (or why) until the last chapter, but that's largely because the author seems to have picked a bad guy more or less at random and then made assertions about how things happened with little regard for plausibility. This is the 19th book in the Victorian London mystery series and Perry has been getting more and more sloppy in making the story believable, seeming more interested in exploring ethical and moral questions than in writing a good murder mystery.
I was dissapointed with this novel. It seemed to me that the book kept dragging itself. While there were interesting turns at some places, the conclusion was not dramatic. It did not make sense why one of those characters would have done the crime -- it was almost like the novel had to be ended and a culprit had to be picked by the toss of a coin.
While the details into Victorian society are good -- the author repeats the same sentences too many times in the book. It could definitely have been a shorter book with a poor end.