The Face of a Stranger

After surviving an attack that wiped his memory clean, can Investigator Monk solve a deadly crime while also picking up the pieces of his former life?

In The Face of a Stranger, New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry introduces us to her enigmatic detective, Investigator William Monk, as he faces a new case with no memory of his past life. Perfect for fans of C. J. Sansom and Arthur Conan Doyle.

He is not going to die, after all, in this Victorian pesthouse called a hospital. But the accident that felled him on a London street has left him with only half a life, because his memory and his entire past have vanished. His name, they tell him, is William Monk, and he is a London police detective; the mirror reflects a face that women would like, but he senses he has been more feared than loved.

Monk is given a particularly sensational case: the brutal murder of Major the Honourable Joscelin Grey, Crimean war hero and a popular man about town, in his rooms in fashionable Mecklenburgh Square. It's an assignment to make or break an investigator, for the exalted status of the victim puts any representative of the police in the precarious position of having to pry into a noble family's secrets.

Suggesting that his superior, the wily Runcorn, hopes he will fail, Monk returns to a world where he cannot distinguish friend from foe. Grasping desperately for any clue to his own past and to the identity of the killer, each new revelation leads Monk step by terrifying step to the answers he seeks but dreads to find.

"Give her a good murder and a shameful social evil, and Anne Perry can write a Victorian mystery that would make Dickens' eyes pop out" ― New York Times Book Review

"A truly unusual mystery... Perry balances plot and character neatly before providing a resolution that few will anticipate" ― Publishers Weekly

"Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries are marvels of plot construction... truly remarkable" ― New York Times

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