Bedford Square

Front Cover
Ballantine Books, 2000 - Fiction - 312 pages
Readers in love with Anne Perry's matchless Victorian mysteries are no strangers to the scandals and secret corruption that sometimes lay concealed behind the elegant facades of the haughty mansions in fin de siecle London. For most Londoners, however, these great houses were inscrutable bastions of privilege and power.
All the more shocking then was the freshly dead body sprawled on the Bedford Square doorstep of General Brandon Ballantyne--an affront to every respectable sensibility.
The general denies all knowledge of the bloody-knuckled, shabbily dressed victim who has so rudely come to death outside his home. But Superintendent Thomas Pitt of Bow Street Police Station cannot believe him. For in the dead man's pocket he finds a rare snuffbox that recently graced the general's study. He must tread lightly, however, lest his investigation trigger a tragedy of immense proportions, ensnaring honorable men like flies in a web of terror. Pitt's clever wife, Charlotte, becomes his full partner in probing this masterpiece of evil, spawned by an amorality greater than they can imagine.
Like all Anne Perry novels, Bedford Square brings to vivid life a world of silver spoons and tattered rags, of men and women who embrace the best and the worst of human nature, where vicious lies become weapons of destruction--and dead men tell no tales.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
19
Section 3
27
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Anne Perry was born Juliet Hume on October 28, 1938 in Blackheath, London. Sent to Christchurch, New Zealand to recover from a childhood case of severe pneumonia, she became very close friends with another girl, Pauline Parker. When Perry's family abandoned her, she had only Parker to turn to, and when the Parkers planned to move from New Zealand, Parker asked that Perry be allowed to join them. When Parker's mother disagreed, Perry and Parker bludgeoned her to death. Perry eventually served five and a half years in an adult prison for the crime. Once she was freed, she changed her name and moved to America, where she eventually became a writer. Her first Victorian novel, The Cater Street Hangman, was published in 1979. Although the truth of her past came out when the case of Mrs. Parker's murder was made into a movie (Heavenly Creatures), Perry is still a popular author and continues to write. She has written over 50 books and short story collections including the Thomas Pitt series, the William Monk series, and the Daniel Pitt series. Her story, Heroes, won the 2001 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Her title's Blind Justice and The Angel Court Affair made The New York Times Best Seller List.