Southampton Row

London, 1898: a murder at a fashionable medium's address, a volatile election teetering on the edge of scandal, and Thomas Pitt ordered to prevent catastrophe rather than simply solve a crime. Anne Perry sets her twenty-second Pitt novel at the intersection of Victorian society's anxieties — political ambition, spiritual hunger, and the violence lurking beneath respectable surfaces. The stakes are unusually high here, with Pitt's oldest enemy maneuvering in the shadows and Charlotte and the children facing dangers of their own, making this an entry in the series where the personal and the political become genuinely, uncomfortably entangled.

Perry's great strength has always been her ability to make Victorian England feel inhabited rather than decorated, and Southampton Row is among the sharper examples of that gift. The spiritualism subplot gives her room to explore grief, credulity, and exploitation with real nuance, while the election backdrop keeps the narrative charged with urgency. The structure moves between Charlotte's domestic world and Pitt's increasingly dangerous political one, and Perry handles that division with a confidence that rewards readers who have followed this series — and pulls in those who haven't.