Reviews for Dark tide rising : a William Monk novel

Publishers Weekly
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In Edgar-finalist Perry's riveting 24th William Monk novel set in Victorian England (after 2017's An Echo of Murder), an attorney approaches the Thames River police commander on behalf of Harry Exeter, an affluent man whose wife was abducted in broad daylight from a London riverbank the previous day. Exeter, who has assembled the considerable ransom demanded, wants Monk's help with handing it over at the site that the kidnappers have set for the exchange: Jacob's Island, not literally an island but a "region of interconnecting waterways with old offices and wharfs." Monk agrees to accompany Exeter there the next day, and assembles a group of his most trusted officers to be on the scene in disguise. But despite Monk's careful planning, the exchange ends in bloody failure, and he's left to wonder who on his team gave the kidnappers the details of his operation. The added suspense from Monk's mole hunt makes this one of the series' more powerful recent entries. Agent: Donald Maass, Donald Maass Literary. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kate, the wife of Oliver Rathbone's newest client Harry Exeter, has been kidnapped, and the abductors have demanded an enormous ransom for her safe return. Exeter, while a wealthy man, still scrambles to pull the money together. The kidnappers want the ransom exchange to take place on Jacob's Island, a dangerous place. Since he's familiar with the river and with Jacob's Island, Monk is the perfect person to accompany Exeter to make the exchange. He gathers his team, including his trusted second-in-command Hooper, to go with him. When they are attacked by the kidnappers and Kate is found brutally murdered, Monk suspects that one of his own men betrayed the operation. He lived through the abduction of his own beloved wife Hester and is especially eager to close this case. As Monk digs deeper into his team's past, old secrets are uncovered and many suspects emerge. VERDICT The 24th title in Perry's long-running William Monk series delivers an excellent atmospheric Victorian mystery. While astute readers will identify the villain long before Monk does, longtime fans will delight in the camaraderie among the series regulars and the return to the dark underbelly of polite British society.-Lynnanne Pearson, Skokie P.L., IL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Cmdr. William Monk, of the Thames River Police, agrees to join a distraught husband in the ransom exchange for his kidnapped wife only to find every conceivable thing going disastrously wrong in Perry's latest slice of Victorian skulduggery.When his wife, Kate, is lured away from her cousin Celia Darwin, who's joined her for lunch in Battersea Park, wealthy developer Harry Exeter is perfectly willing to pay the enormous sum her kidnappers demand even if it means exhausting his own resources and tapping into an inheritance Maurice Latham, another cousin, is holding in trust for Kate for another 18 months. Because the criminals have appointed dark, treacherous Jacob's Island as the place to trade their victim for the ransom, Exeter's attorney, Sir Oliver Rathbone, suggests that his old friend Monk accompany him, and Monk himself handpicks five members of the TRP to join them: officers Bathurst, Laker, Marbury, Walcott, and Hooper, his second-in-command. Upon their arrival at Jacob's Island, the party is ambushed by a crew that makes off with the money, leaving behind the brutally slashed corpse of Kate Exeter. Since their assailants clearly knew in advance the precise movements of Monk and his team, Monk (An Echo of Murder, 2017, etc.) is forced to concede that one of his own men may have betrayed him. As he struggles to fix the guilt on one of them (bantam street fighter Walcott? Bathurst, whose family is eternally in financial straits? Hooper, whom he'd trusted more than once with his life?), two other murders follow, and John Hooper complicates matters even further by falling in love with Celia Darwinan apparent tangent that will play a crucial role in precipitating the courtroom climax.One of the most successful of prolific Perry's recent Victorian melodramas. The opening chapters are appropriately portentous, the mystification is authentic, and if the final surprise isn't exactly a shock, it's so well-prepared that even readers who don't gasp will nod in satisfaction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

A nightmarish atmosphere infuses the central crime scene in William Monk's twenty-fourth case, involving the kidnapping and rescue of Kate Exeter, which comes at an exorbitant cost. Monk gathers five of his best river policemen and, with Kate's husband, Harry, (and the ransom money) aboard, runs two river boats out to the derelict Jacob's Island community. They have been directed inside a ramshackle, stilted building that shifts at sunset, just as the tide begins to rise. Experienced readers will suspect something awful is about to occur, but they will never guess what. The unraveling of events is labyrinthine and shocking, the motive all too human. As always, Perry adds a psychological twist for readers to mull over; in this case, it's the lengths to which we go to hide our shameful secrets. Readers attracted to bleak, detailed Victorian mysteries might also look at Alex Grecian's Walter Day series, starting with The Yard (2012), and the Silas Quinn series by Roger Morris, beginning with Summon up the Blood (2012), both of which are intelligent mysteries with tangled roots and startling crimes set in a darkly disturbing nineteenth-century Britain.--Jen Baker Copyright 2018 Booklist

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