Weighed in the Balance (William Monk Series #7)

by Anne Perry

Overview

When Countess Zorah Rostova asks London barrister Sir Oliver Rathbone to defend her against a charge of slander, he is astonished to find himself accepting. For without a shred of evidence, the countess has publicly insisted that the onetime ruler of her small German principality was murdered by his wife, the woman who was responsible for the prince’s exile to Venice twenty years before. Private investigator William Monk and his friend Hester Latterly journey to the City of Water in an attempt verify the countess’s claims, and though the two manage to establish that the prince was indeed murdered, as events unfold the likeliest suspect seems to be Countess Zorah herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345514059
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/26/2010
Series:	William Monk Series , #7
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anne Perry was the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England: the William Monk novels and the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels. She was also the author of a series featuring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt's son, Daniel, as well as the Elena Standish series; a series of five World War I novels; twenty-one holiday novels; and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Byzantine Empire. Anne Perry died in 2023.

Hometown:

Portmahomack, Ross-shire, U.K

Date of Birth:

October 28, 1938

Place of Birth:

Blackheath, London England

Website:

http://www.anneperry.net

Editorial Reviews

The denouement is unexpected and ingenious.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“[Takes] the reader clue-hunting through the glittery courts of Venice, London, and a never-never-land principality. It’s all rich as a warm scone slathered with jam and clotted cream.”—St. Petersburg Times
 
“Highly entertaining.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

From the Publisher

Twelve years after middle-German Prince Friedrich abdicated his throne to marry Gisela Berentz, and four months after the Prince died following a fall from a horse, his intimate friend Countess Zorah Rostova retains Sir Oliver Rathbone, Q.C., to prove her innocent of a charge of slander. The Countess's proposed defense: What she said, publicly and repeatedly, was true—Princess Gisela really did murder her husband. Retaining inquiry agent William Monk (Cain His Brother, 1995, etc.) to gather evidence for the Countess's allegation, Sir Oliver soon finds that there is no evidence. By all accounts, the Prince and Princess were remarkably devoted to each other, and the rumors of a movement to return the Prince, unencumbered by the Princess his mother so disapproves of, to his throne and to a fight for independence from the surrounding states only points suspicion everywhere but toward the Princess. In fact, as Sir Oliver discovers when he's dragged into the Old Bailey, the evidence of fatal poisoning is far less strong against Princess Gisela than against his own client. It would be ironic if the key to the mystery lay with Robert Ollenheim, the paralyzed young patient of Hester Latterly, the nurse Monk cannot help loving—and a coincidence only Perry's most devoted fans will accept.

Indefatigable Perry serves up as arresting an opening as ever—she may write the strongest first chapters in the business—before miring her sleuths in endless dully civil conversations with titled nonentities and in a farcically incompetent trial that Sir Oliver should have tried even harder to avoid.

Kirkus Reviews