Seven Dials

Seven Dials, the twenty-third Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novel, sets the investigation inside the volatile politics of Gladstone's Britain. A junior diplomat is found dead in the garden of a cabinet minister whose reputation depends on keeping the truth buried. Pitt follows the evidence from London drawing rooms to the slums of Seven Dials, from Alexandria's cotton fields to Bedlam, while Charlotte pursues a parallel thread that ultimately brings the threads together. Perry writes Victorian political conspiracy with practiced authority.

Amy Scanlon's narration carries the novel's period atmosphere and the particular social pressures of a case in which the official instruction is to protect a powerful man's reputation rather than find the truth. At nearly fourteen hours the audiobook gives Perry's complex plotting its necessary room, and Scanlon's command of the period register gives the Victorian setting its characteristic texture.