No one writes more elegantly than Perry, nor better conjures up the rich and colorful tapestry of London in the Victorian era. But for all its arcane setting and stylistic eloquence, Funeral in Blue is an old-style private-eye novel--and an extremely good one.

Two beautiful women have been found strangled in the studio of a well-known London artist. To investigator William Monk and his wife, Hester, the murders are a nightmare. One of the victims is the wife of Hester's cherished colleague, surgeon Dr. Kristian Beck, a Viennese emigre who becomes the prime suspect. With an intensity born of desperation, Hester and Monk seek evidence that will save him from the hangman. From the city's sinister slums to the crowded coffeehouses of Vienna, where embers of the revolution still burn in the hearts of freedom-loving men and women, they seek to penetrate not only the mystery of Elissa Beck's death,but the riddle of her life...