Where Charlotte Meets Inspector Pitt

The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have some quibbles with the book, and I could see giving this only 3 stars (not bad), but despite the things I'd consider flaws I still found it pretty fun to read. From a stack of books with bookmarks in them (I have so many books going at one time...) this was the one I picked up over and over until I finished it.

So--4 stars. Not perfect for me, but a pleasure to read.

Mainly, it's a decent mystery with some likable characters and a satisfying ending. There's also a bit of romance mixed in, which adds interest. And Charlotte is my favorite kind of 19th century female MC--she's mostly proper, but she's too smart and too independent to just comply with society's plan to squash her. In other words, she's a little less prejudiced, a bit less shallow, a little less interested in what people think of her, and a bit more interested in living her life her own way. The author doesn't make her ridiculous; she's still a product of her times, not a 1980's era feminist. But she does push the boundaries.

I didn't love everything. The mystery isn't solved by much detection. That is, the novel doesn't mostly deal with someone working to put together clues that the reader tries to sort into a pattern along with the detective. There's some of that, but not a lot. I could have used more. Mostly, we follow the family, and there's a bunch of family drama. That's okay; I don't totally mind. That makes it lean a little toward 19th century literature in tone, and that's good, in its own way. But the gathering of clues is definitely second. (I read the next novel out of order, and book 2 in the series is more like a traditional mystery with most of the pages dealing with the gathering of clues. I suspect book 3 follows that trend.)

The other thing I didn't love is all the less interesting points of view. Much of the book is from the perspective of Charlotte's mother or one of her sisters or her grandmother or brother-in-law. It was weird to be entering into all of their heads and being absent from Charlotte for so long. Though this is still in 3rd person limited omniscient POV, giving us nothing but what the current POV character sees and hears and thinks, it moves around chapter by chapter to lots of different heads. It's not literally head-hopping like old-fashioned omniscient novels of earlier in the century, but it's somewhere kinda close to that, which makes sense considering the series was first started in 1979. Publishing has different expectations in 2025 than it did almost 50 years ago.

(Yes, Game of Thrones and other fantasy novels have huge numbers of POV characters. Without checking first to see if I'm right, I'm going assert that as a genre difference. That's how it seems to me, which is all the evidence I need to claim it here.) :)

The effect of all the additional POV characters is to squeeze Charlotte out more than I would prefer. (Strangely, we never get Pitt as the POV character here.) And in the second book, we get quite a bit in her sister's POV, which I thought was odd, along with several of the suspects, but now I can see, all in all, that it focuses more on Charlotte than the first book did. That feels like a trend.

Although the series is supposed to be all about Charlotte and Inspector Pitt, which is how the books are all branded later in the series, it feels like that's something that evolved over time, and perhaps the author hadn't planned it that way from the start. That's a guess, but that's how it reads. In any case, it leaves me more interested than before in book 3, to see if the story does move to a tighter focus on the two central characters.

Anyway, it is fun to read, and I'm glad there's a bunch more of them published, including a couple already on their way to my address.

Recommended for historical mystery readers.

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