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About Highgate Rise
Product Description 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. Review “When it comes to the Victorian mystery, Anne Perry has proved that nobody does it better.”— The San Diego Union-Tribune “Give her a good murder and a shameful social evil, and Anne Perry can write a Victorian mystery that would make Dickens’s eyes pop.”— The New York Times Book Review “Perry gets the Victorian mood just right. . . . Settle in with this one on a rainy day.”— Booklist “Descriptions of London’s Upstairs/Downstairs society [are] historically illuminating.”— St. Petersburg Times “Rounded out by a host of lively characters, this is a memorable tale.”— Publishers Weekly About the Author Anne Perry is the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England: the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Death on Blackheath and Midnight at Marble Arch, and the William Monk novels, including Blood on the Water and Blind Justice. She is also the author of a series of five World War I novels, as well as twelve holiday novels, most recently A New York Christmas, and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Ottoman Empire. Anne Perry lives in Los Angeles and Scotland. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INSPECTOR THOMAS PITT STARED at the smoking ruins of the house, oblivious of the steady rain drenching him, plastering his hair over his forehead and running between his turned-up coat collar and his knitted muffler in a cold dribble down his back. He could still feel the heat coming from the mounds of blackened bricks. The water dripped from broken arches and sizzled where it hit the embers, rising in thin curls of steam. Even from what was left of it he could see that it had been a gracious building, somebody’s home, well constructed and elegant. Now there was little left but the servants’ quarters. Beside him Constable James Murdo shifted from one foot to the other. He was from the local Highgate station and he resented his superiors having called in a man from the city, even one with as high a reputation as Pitt’s. They had hardly had a chance to deal with it themselves; there was no call to go sending for help this early—whatever the case proved to be. But his opinion had been ignored, and here was Pitt, scruffy, ill-clad apart from his boots, which were beautiful. His pockets bulged with nameless rubbish, his gloves were odd, and his face was smudged with soot and creased with sadness. “Reckon it started almost midnight, sir,” Murdo said, to show that his own force was efficient and had already done all that could be expected. “A Miss Dalton, elderly lady down on St. Alban’s Road, saw it when she woke at about quarter past one. It was already burning fiercely and she raised the alarm, sent her maid to Colonel Anstruther’s next door. He has one of those telephone instruments. And they were insured, so the fire brigade arrived about twenty minutes later, but there wasn’t much they could do. By then all the main house was alight. They got water from the Highgate Ponds”—he waved his arm—“just across the fields there.” Pitt nodded, picturing the scene in his mind, the fear, the blistering heat driving the men backwards, the frightened horses, the canvas buckets passed from hand to hand, and the use
