William Monk, the unquestionably handsome, somewhat vain, but genuinely tender-hearted "agent of enquiry" is back on the streets of Victorian London, investigating his 10th case, a missing woman. Miriam Gardiner was due to be betrothed to a much younger man, a well-to-do gentleman named Lucius Stourbridge. But during a family croquet party, the bride-to-be vanished, apparently fleeing in a coach driven by a family servant named Treadwell. Perhaps just a simple case of pre- wedding jitters, Monk would normally be reluctant to take on such a seemingly dull case but his own recent marriage to the headstrong nurse Hester Latterly gives Monk a new- found empathy for the heartbroken Lucius. Of course as is tradition in Perry's historical mysteries, all is not quite as it seems. Treadwell is found murdered and the missing Miriam becomes the number one suspect. Monk is convinced that she "could and would do no intentional evil", even as Hester connects her to another illicit crime. Eventually unearthed by London's finest, Miriam is arrested and charged with murder. It's up to barrister Oliver Rathbone to absolve her in court (with a little help from his good friends William and Hester Monk).

With a plot twist around every corner, Anne Perry knows just how to keep us in suspense, right up to the exceedingly dramatic finale. The Twisted Root is a luminous whodunit from the queen of the Victorian mystery. --Naomi Gesigner

2008-07-24 the real thing

this review could probably apply to any of the Anne Perry Monk books as I have read most of them and am constantly amazed by her genuineness, if such a word exists. there are other novelists who have plundered the English Victorian period but none have succeeded in pulling it off the way that Anne Perry does. She never makes the mistake of letting her research show and yet the books are superbly researched as each one deals with an "issue" relevant to the times. I feel she must have hitched a ride in Dr Who's TARDIS and has trawled back the very Victorian sensibility with which she furnishes her books. amazing