Book Review: Buckingham Palace Gardens By Anne Perry

By Carlotta G. Holton

Anne Perry has a way of transporting the reader back to Victorian times deftly handling the issues of social class, history and political intrigue while occupying the reader with a murder mystery. A long-time fan of her Thomas Pitt series, I found Buckingham Palace Gardens, her 25th novel to feature the recurring sleuth, to be on par with her previous works.

It is 1893 and Queen Victoria is away from the palace. In her absence, her son, Albert, Prince of Wales, is entertaining three businessmen/friends with whom he is planning a railway project in Africa. After an evening of wine, women and song, a murdered prostitute is found the next morning in the linen closet of the palace. Fearing political disaster for the monarchy, the prince calls in the services of Special Branch to quietly clean up the mess. Enter Detective Thomas Pitt.

When Pitt’s investigations reveal that the murderer must be one of the Prince’s friends, he asks his wife’s maid, Gracie Phipps, to go undercover as a servant to ferret out whatever information she can from the household staff. Perry offers this opportunity for this character to shine. While in previous novels, she helps in minor ways with investigations, Gracie plays a key role in this novel. Her character is the vehicle for showing the differences amongst the servants who for the most part can’t read and do not have great expectations to rise in their station. Perry depicts the invisibility of the servants who stand in the background serving meals or tea while the guests treat them as if they weren’t there. The irony is that their very presence “belowstairs” makes their situations rife for juicy gossip.

As readers expect, Perry delivers on the period details and ambiance. Her writing mirrors the Victorian times with all its charm and social inequalities. Pitt is appropriately awkward in dealing with the royalty, though he is married to Charlotte, a woman of the gentry. He observes, to his dismay, the upper classes’ general disregard for rules and their predilection toward “making their own laws and providing their own justice.”

Pitt focuses on the prince’s friends and learns of a similar murder in Africa years ago. Two of the men at the palace were in Africa at the same time. Are the murders related? Is there a connection? Is the same person responsible or is someone copying the other murder to lead authorities astray? Perry’s plot twists and turns as broken pieces of a Limoge dish, wine bottles with traces of blood, and the queen’s own bloody sheets point to one suspect above all others. But were these clues planted by a murderer so conniving as to turn suspicions away from himself and onto another? Just when the reader thinks he knows the culprit, the plot takes an unexpected turn. And so this seemingly simple mystery transforms into a perplexing one. Get a cup of tea, find a comfy chair, and settle in for an entertaining and good read.

Carlotta Holton is a regular contributor to Writers’ News Weekly, and an award-winning author, most recently of Vampire Resurrection. She can be reached at Carlotta@holtonhorrorandmore.com. Check out her earlier literary spotlight of Anne Perry HERE

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.