Long Spoon Lane (Charlotte & Thomas Pitt Novels)

Anne Perrys bestselling Victorian novels offer readers an elixir as addictively rich as Devonshire cream or English ale–enticing millions into a literary world almost as real as the original. While flower sellers, costermongers, shopkeepers, and hansom drivers ply their trades, the London police watch over all. Or so people believe. . . .

Early one morning, Thomas Pitt, dauntless mainstay of the Special Branch, is summoned to Long Spoon Lane, where anarchists are plotting an attack. Bombs explode, destroying the homes of many poor people. After a chase, two of the culprits are captured and the leader is shot . . . but by whom?

As Pitt delves into the case, he finds that there is more to the terrorism than the destructive gestures of misguided idealists. The police are running a lucrative protection racket, and clues suggest that Inspector Wetron of Bow Street is the mastermind. As the shadowy leader of the Inner Circle, Wetron is using his influence with the press to whip up fears of more attacks–and to rush a bill through Parliament that would severely curtail civil liberties. This would make him the most powerful man in the country.

To defeat Wetron, Pitt finds that he must run in harness with his old enemy, Sir Charles Voisey, and the unlikely allies are joined by Pitts clever wife, Charlotte, and her great aunt, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould. Can they prevail? As they strive to prevent future destruction, nothing less than the fate of the British Empire hangs in precarious balance.

From the first sentence to the last, Long Spoon Lane is a miracle of suspense, of plot and counterplot, bluff and counterbluff, in a take-no-prisoners battle between good and evil. It is possibly the very best of all the wonderful Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels.

"Carnage comes early in Perry's engrossing Victorian historical, the follow-up to Seven Dials (2003), when Special Branch investigator Thomas Pitt is summoned in the middle of the night to the aftermath of a bombing, the work of unknown anarchists intent on wreaking havoc in London in revenge for high-level police corruption. The chase leads to the group's lair in an abandoned building along grimy Long Spoon Lane, where the body of Magnus Landsborough, son of a well-connected lord, raises disturbing questions about both the young man's association with the underground cell and police procedures to combat terrorists. Pitt and fellow detective Victor Narraway soon find themselves up against a powerful secret society known as the Inner Circle. True-to-life parliamentary debate ensues over how much power police should be granted to quash the anarchist threat to Queen and country. The action slows when myriad characters, including wives, servants and politicians, hold excessively detailed discussions of the case, but the pace picks up with a spirited pursuit through London and across the Thames. Perry manages to paint a convincing historical backdrop with echoes of modern-day fears of urban terrorism. Agent, Donald Maass. 12-city author tour. (On sale Mar. 29)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The sequel to the bestselling "Seven Dials" is another riveting novel in which Ann Perry again proves herself "a master of crime fiction" (Baltimore "Sun").

ANNE PERRY is the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Southampton Row and Seven Dials, and the William Monk novels, most recently Death of a Stranger and The Shifting Tide. Her novels No Graves As Yet and Shoulder the Sky launched a five-book miniseries about World War I. Anne Perry lives in Scotland. Visit her website at www.anneperry.net.