Southampton Row

Southampton Row, the twenty-second Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novel, sets a political campaign and a spiritualist murder in parallel. A medium is killed following a late-night seance attended by a cabinet minister's wife, and Pitt — ordered to prevent political scandal rather than find truth — must work around his own institutional constraints to do his job. Perry draws the Victorian obsession with spiritualism with historical precision, and the election backdrop gives the social comedy an edge of genuine power-politics anxiety.

Amy Scanlon narrates with the period authority the Pitt series requires. Her management of the novel's dual storylines — Pitt's London investigation and Charlotte's country vacation, both under threat from the same forces — keeps the parallel tension clear. At just over thirteen and a half hours the audiobook delivers one of the series' more politically sophisticated entries.