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CORRIDORS OF THE NIGHT, Anne Perry's latest book featuring Thomas and Hester Monk, begins in an intense fashion but then becomes a hodge-podge of three different focuses. Hester discovers three sickly children in a secret hospital ward. She saves one of them from dying, but then realizes that they are being used as part of gruesome experiment in harvesting human blood. Without the knowledge that not all blood is the same, a monomaniacal scientist named Hamilton Rand has been trying to treat dying patients with injections of blood. Most of his patients have died, but he has found that the blood from these three children is able to help a patient with what is called "white blood disease," possibly something like leukemia. As a nurse, Hester is torn between her commitment to the children and her understanding of the critical need to find a way to transfuse blood and save people. This is a fascinating premise.
As the reader is pulled into this plot and the subsequent events, the scene changes to Monk, Commander of the Thames River Police, raiding a gunrunner boat. He does not get the regular police support he was promised and tragedy ensues. This is a violent and fast-moving set piece, but it has little to do with the main events of the novel. After this mis-adventure on the Thames, Monk discovers that Hester has gone missing and he must find and rescue her. Although the reader knows what she has been pulled into, the nature of the experiments and who is responsible, it is suddenly apparent that Monk has this information as well. It almost feels as though a chapter or two of critical scenes had been cut, replaced by a few sentences explaining what Monk knows. Then he makes a plan to rescue his kidnapped wife and the plan works out. But the book is barely half over.
Next we have a trial in which the disgraced Sir Oliver Rathbone is allowed to assist. Throughout the book, Hester's dedication to the precepts of nursing - that attending to the ill must come before anything else - puts her in harm's way and also makes others disbelieve that her participation was forced. There are other plot developments, most of which are not explained or solved. Certain of Hester's ideas of are referred to but never shown in the first place.
For the returning reader, it is always a treat to follow Hester and Thomas Monk, but CORRIDORS OF THE NIGHT is a confused and fragmented novel. It tantalizes with possibilities but is not Anne Perry at her best.
§ Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, September 2015
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