Scan barcode
A review by weaselweader
Farriers' Lane by Anne Perry
2.0
“She tried to imagine [his face] contorted with the hatred that would stab a man to death and then crucify his corpse.”
In one of the most sensational cases to ever rock Victorian England – the stabbing and post mortem crucifixion of the corpse against an alley way door – the convicted and subsequently executed murderer was a Jew. That the capture of the allegedly blasphemous suspect and his conviction was completed with unseemly haste was always known but all and sundry were convinced that the verdict was correct and that justice had been done. Five years later, when Justice Stafford, a distinguished judge on the court of appeals, was murdered by opium poisoning in his theater box and later found to have been questioning that long established verdict and re-examining the evidence, the case is quietly re-opened. Police Inspector Thomas Pitt finds himself investigating two murders and swimming upstream against a veritable tsunami of anti-Semitic venom and hatred.
I have to give Anne Perry full credit for a colourful, if somewhat contentious and controversial thematic idea for this entry in the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery series. But the execution, in my opinion at least, was deeply flawed. Pitt’s investigation consisted of asking the same entirely obvious questions (over and over and over again … and then some more) regarding the first murder of a string of reluctant witnesses, police officers, and appeal judges who gave the same answers (over and over and over again ... and then some more) and persisted ad nauseum in their belief of the validity of the original guilty verdict and the subsequent execution of the convicted perpetrator. It became really quite tedious. But what’s even worse is that the story evolved quickly into something disturbing, disgusting and heart-breakingly tedious when those interviews were overlaid with a resounding drumbeat of outrageous anti-Semitism. I get it! Anti-Semitism was a fact in Christian Victorian England but Anne Perry’s use of that fact in her story went way beyond the pale.
It’s an unavoidable logical inevitability that when an author pens a multi-novel series, one of the entries in that series MUST be the worst of the lot. While I still consider myself a member of the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt fan club, FARRIER’S LANE gets my vote for the worst of those that I’ve read. Not recommended. Look elsewhere in the series.
Paul Weiss
In one of the most sensational cases to ever rock Victorian England – the stabbing and post mortem crucifixion of the corpse against an alley way door – the convicted and subsequently executed murderer was a Jew. That the capture of the allegedly blasphemous suspect and his conviction was completed with unseemly haste was always known but all and sundry were convinced that the verdict was correct and that justice had been done. Five years later, when Justice Stafford, a distinguished judge on the court of appeals, was murdered by opium poisoning in his theater box and later found to have been questioning that long established verdict and re-examining the evidence, the case is quietly re-opened. Police Inspector Thomas Pitt finds himself investigating two murders and swimming upstream against a veritable tsunami of anti-Semitic venom and hatred.
I have to give Anne Perry full credit for a colourful, if somewhat contentious and controversial thematic idea for this entry in the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery series. But the execution, in my opinion at least, was deeply flawed. Pitt’s investigation consisted of asking the same entirely obvious questions (over and over and over again … and then some more) regarding the first murder of a string of reluctant witnesses, police officers, and appeal judges who gave the same answers (over and over and over again ... and then some more) and persisted ad nauseum in their belief of the validity of the original guilty verdict and the subsequent execution of the convicted perpetrator. It became really quite tedious. But what’s even worse is that the story evolved quickly into something disturbing, disgusting and heart-breakingly tedious when those interviews were overlaid with a resounding drumbeat of outrageous anti-Semitism. I get it! Anti-Semitism was a fact in Christian Victorian England but Anne Perry’s use of that fact in her story went way beyond the pale.
It’s an unavoidable logical inevitability that when an author pens a multi-novel series, one of the entries in that series MUST be the worst of the lot. While I still consider myself a member of the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt fan club, FARRIER’S LANE gets my vote for the worst of those that I’ve read. Not recommended. Look elsewhere in the series.
Paul Weiss