What do You think about Paragon Walk (1986)?
If you like Victorian cozies and lovable characters, this book is for you.With the third in the Pitt series, the author, Anne Perry hits her stride. The story begins with a body in the morgue. The victim is slight, delicately featured, beautifully dressed, her arms bruised, her face barely touched by life. Fanny Nash is seventeen when she is stabbed and raped in Paragon Walk, a London neighborhood of impeccable pedigree, and the neighborhood, as luck would have it, of Charlotte’s sister, Emily, and her husband, Lord Ashworth.Pitt is called in to to investigate. In so doing, he scrapes the surface of society—the inhabitants, their servants, their families—revealing their stories, their guilt, their secrets, their relationships with one another, their pompous ill regard for most everyone else. Ms Perry lays bare the hypocrisy at the heart of Victorian society, the theme at the heart of this intricately plotted, beautifully and accurately detailed novel. You won’t want it to end, but end it does, just after the mystery is solved.Meet the ageless beauty, Lady Vespasia Cumming-GouldA recurring character in the Pitt series, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, makes her first appearance in this novel. A favorite character of many readers, this one included, she happens to be staying with Emily and George in their Paragon Walk townhouse. Beautifully attired, outspoken, and witty, she serves, perhaps as the author’s point of view, but certainly as a delightful deus ex machina in this, as well as in subsequent novels in the series. One of her more envious characteristics is that she doesn’t age. She’s about seventy or eighty in Paragon Walk, and she approaches seventy in Treason in Lisson Grove which takes place, almost fifteen years later. You go, girl, Cumming-Gould!
—Susan Anderson
I enjoy this series but there is a trend here I don't like. This was a very intriguing story right up until a ridiculously abrupt ending. I clicked the next page and couldn't believe that the book had actually ended; I thought I had accidentally jumped ahead a chapter. I looked back on my reviews of the first two books in this series and saw that I noted the same thing in both of them-weak, abrupt endings. Hmm...it definitely knocks it down from 4 stars to 3. I already have the next several books on my Kindle and I enjoy the series enough that I'll gladly be continuing on with it, but I'm hoping hard for some stronger endings.
—Donna
This is the third adventure with Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. A young woman is butally raped and murdered in elegant Paragon Walk. She is a quiet retiring young woman and no on can figure out how this tragedy happened in such an upscale Victorian neighborhood. Nothing is making sense when even more people are found murdered. Charlotte and her sister, Emily help Thomas Pitt by moving in society in ways he never could.The story is good, but the best thing is the introduction of Aunt Vespalia, Emily's husband's aunt. She is delightful and a wonderful addition. As usual, the Victorian society assumes that the murder is done by one of the servants and that the murdered young woman must have been immoral even though there isn't a shred of evidence to suspect that. They engage in a frustrating circular argument which goes something like this. If the girl was raped, she must have been immoral. Even though she seems to be sweet, chaste and virginal, we know that she must have been immoral because she was raped. None of the upper class should be questioned in this matter because they don't come from the strata of society that committs crimes; they are upper class hence, they must be innocent.The ever patient Thomas Pitt has to tiptoe around the upper class sensibilities in order to get any information at all, but he never falters. The help of Charlotte, Emily and Aunt Vespalia is vital in getting around barriers as they drink tea and engage in the gossip that brings out the elusive clues.
—Anne Hawn Smith
