Someone on posh Callander Square will kill to keep a secret in this “superior” mystery from the New York Times–bestselling author of Twenty-One Days (The San Diego Union-Tribune). When two dead infants are dug up in the Callander Square gardens, the upper-class residents dismiss the burials as the desperate act of a low-born girl and resent the intrusion of Inspector Thomas Pitt into their well-ordered lives. Pitt is not convinced that the case should be so easily dropped. Also intrigued by the mystery, Pitt’s well-born wife, Charlotte, pursues her own investigation into places Thomas would never have access—the parlors and inner chambers of the mansions on the fashionable square. With her sister Emily, Lady Ashworth, who lives on Callander Square, she delves into the lives and secrets of the residents. Thomas and Charlotte, now expecting their first child, form the perfect sleuthing couple. Elegant closets soon spill their skeletons exposing long-hidden secrets—secrets that could lead even the most upright aristocrat to kill. But will Pitt’s keen investigative skills and Charlotte’s insights into the workings of high-class society solve the mystery in time to save the innocent residents of Callander Square from the murderer among them? Callander Square is the 2nd book in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order. /DIV

It is a most incredible sight: a corpse sitting at the reins of a hansom cab–and not just any corpse, but the body of a peer of the realm. To Inspector Thomas Pitt and his wife, Charlotte, this macabre apparition seems like sheer lunacy. Who would ever want to exhume a decently buried old chap like Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond? A doctor insists that Lord Augustus’s death was natural. But as far as the police are concerned, there’s certainly nothing natural about any of this gristly aftermath. Inspector Pitt is determined to unearth the truth–even if the digging puts his own life at perilous risk.

When a group of powerful Irish Protestants and Catholics gather at a country house to discuss Irish home rule, contention is to be expected. But when the meeting’s moderator, government bigwig Ainsley Greville, is found murdered in his bath, negotiations seem doomed. Unless Superintendent Thomas Pitt and his wife, Charlotte, can root out the truth, simmering hatreds and passions may again explode in murder.

Clemency Shaw, the wife of a prominent doctor, has died in a tragic fire in the peaceful suburb of Highgate. But the blaze was set by an arsonist, and it is unclear whether she or Dr. Shaw was the intended victim—or did the doctor himself set the blaze in order to inherit his wife’s large fortune? Baffled by the scarcity of clues in this terrible crime, Inspector Thomas Pitt turns to the people who had been closest to the couple—Clemency’s stuffy but distinguished relatives. Meanwhile, Pitt’s wellborn wife, Charlotte, retraces the dangerous path that Clemency walked in the last months of her life, finding herself enmeshed in a sinister web that stretches from the lowest slums to the loftiest centers of power.

The freshly dead body sprawled on the Bedford Square doorstep of General Brandon Balantyne is an affront to every respectable sensibility. The general denies all knowledge of the shabbily dressed victim who has so rudely come to death outside his home, but Superintendent Thomas Pitt cannot believe him—for in the dead man’s pocket, Pitt finds a rare snuffbox that recently graced the general’s study. The superintendent must tread lightly, however, lest his investigation trigger a tragedy of immense proportions, ensnaring honorable men like flies in a web. Pitt’s clever wife, Charlotte, becomes his full partner in probing this masterpiece of evil, spawned by an amorality greater than they can imagine.

In the debut of the New York Times–bestselling Victorian crime series, Inspector Thomas Pitt seeks an elusive strangler among upper-class British society. Panic and fear strike the Ellison household when one of their own falls prey to the Cater Street murderer. While Mrs. Ellison and her three daughters are out, their maid becomes the third victim of a killer who strangles young women with cheese wire, leaving their swollen-faced bodies on the dark streets of this genteel neighborhood. Inspector Pitt, assigned to the case, must break through the walls of upper-class society to get at the truth. His in-depth investigation gradually peels away the proper veneer of the elite world, exposing secrets and desires until suspicion becomes more frightening than truth. Outspoken Charlotte Ellison, struggling to remain within the confining boundaries of Victorian manners, has no trouble expressing herself to the irritating policeman. As their relationship shifts from antagonistic sparring to a romantic connection, the socially mismatched pair must solve the mystery before the hangman strikes again. Rich with authentic period details and blending suspenseful mystery with a budding romance between Inspector Pitt and Charlotte Ellison, The Cater Street Hangman launched the long-running series by Edgar Award–winning author Anne Perry, with recent titles including The Angel Court Affair and Treachery at Lancaster Gate. Also the creator of the William Monk Novels, Perry has become one of the great names in detective fiction. As the Philadelphia Inquirer says, “Pitt’s compassion and Charlotte’s cleverness make them compatible sleuths, as well as extremely congenial characters. . . . Perry has the gift of making [the Victorian era] seem immediate and very much alive.”

When a doctor is found brutally murdered in the lurid section of London aptly named “Devil’s Acre,” even its most hardened residents are stunned. But shock soon turns to horror when Inspector Thomas Pitt discovers three more bodies with the same gruesome “calling card”: a stab wound in the back and a rather inexpertly executed mutilation. As Pitt and his wife, Charlotte, race against time to find the killer, a treacherous mystery unfolds. And no one, not the lowest brand of ruffian or the most established aristocrat, will escape unscathed.