The Face of a Stranger Author:Anne Perry Here is a novel of haunting psychological suspense, set in a richly detailed world. — He is not going to die, after all, in this Victorian pesthouse called a hospital. But the accident that has felled him on a London street has left him with only half a life, because his memory and his entire past have vanished. — His name, they tell him, is Will... more »iam Monk, he is a London police detective. His mirror reflects a face that women would like, but from the way people respond to him when he returns to the force, he senses that he has been more feared than loved.
The case he is given is a particularly sensational one; the brutal murder of Major the Honorable Joscelin Grey, Crimean war hero and a popular man about town, in his room in fashionable Mecklenburg Square. It's an assignment to make or break an investigator, for the exalted status of the victim puts any representative of the police in a precarious position of having to pry into a noble family's secrets. That in itself will be all the more difficult for Monk, as he's forgotten his professional skills along with everything else.
Suspecting that his superior, the wily Runcorn, hopes he will fail, he returns to a world where he cannot distinguish friend from foe, where he must grasp desperately for any clue to his own past and to the identity of a killer.
Slowly the darkness begins to lighten, as he recognizes traces of his forgotten life. The gentle beauty of a woman who seems to know him. The dangerous information he tracks down in the city's unsavory "rookeries." The growing hostility from the dead man's aristocratic family. The revulsion he feels when he enters the dead man's rooms. And each new revelation leads Monk step-by-terrifying-step to the answers he seeks but dreads to find.« less