Start with The face of a stranger, the first William Monk novel. A police detective wakes in hospital after a carriage crash with no memory of who he is, works out from his colleagues' reactions that he was disliked and feared, and has to conduct a murder investigation while concealing that he cannot remember his own life — or rule out that he is implicated in it. That premise carries the whole series and it is doing more work than anything in the other books.
The obvious alternative is The Cater Street Hangman, which is Perry's actual debut and opens the longer and better-known Thomas Pitt series. Read it, but read it second. The early Pitt novels are apprentice work: short, tidy, structurally repetitive, and it takes several books before the series finds what it is for.
The William Monk series
In this path, in order: The face of a stranger, A dangerous mourning, Defend and betray, A Sudden Fearful Death, The sins of the wolf and The silent cry. Books six and seven of the published run, Cain His Brother and Weighed in the Balance, are not in our catalogue and sit between the last two.
Order matters here more than in most Victorian mystery series, because the three central figures change across it. Monk recovers pieces of his past a book at a time, which means the series is partly a mystery about its own detective. Hester Latterly, a nurse who served in the Crimea under Florence Nightingale and cannot readjust to what English medicine expects of women, is the best character Perry created. Oliver Rathbone, the barrister, gives the books their courtroom half. Defend and betray and A Sudden Fearful Death are where the series is usually said to hit its stride.
The Thomas Pitt series
In order here: The Cater Street Hangman, Callander Square, Resurrection Row, Bluegate Fields, Death in the Devil's Acre, Silence in Hanover Close and Highgate Rise. Paragon Walk, Rutland Place, Cardington Crescent and Bethlehem Road fall among them and are not in this list; the full run continues past thirty books.
The device is the marriage. Thomas Pitt is a gamekeeper's son who became a policeman; Charlotte is a gentleman's daughter who married beneath her class to do it. He can enter the houses but not the drawing rooms; she can go where he cannot and be told things no policeman would hear. Perry uses each novel to walk into a specific Victorian scandal — child prostitution in Bluegate Fields, the slums and public health in Highgate Rise — and the books get considerably better from Bluegate Fields onward as the social material stops being backdrop.
The First World War quintet
No Graves As Yet opens a five-book sequence with one novel per year of the war, following Joseph Reavley, a Cambridge don who becomes an army chaplain. Shoulder the Sky, Angels in the Gloom, At Some Disputed Barricade and We Shall Not Sleep complete it and are not in this path. It is a much darker sequence than either Victorian series and the mystery plots are subordinate to the war; read it after you know whether you like her.
Two later series are not represented here at all: Daniel Pitt, following Thomas and Charlotte's son as a barrister in the 1910s, and Elena Standish, a photographer in 1930s Europe. There are also around twenty Christmas novellas, each hanging off a minor character from the Victorian books; they are short, slight, and best treated as extras.
The biographical fact readers ask about
Anne Perry was born Juliet Hulme. In 1954, aged fifteen, she and her friend Pauline Parker killed Parker's mother in Christchurch, New Zealand. She was convicted, served just over five years, and afterwards took the name under which she published. The connection between the writer and the case became public knowledge in 1994. She died in 2023. None of it is in the novels, and readers who want the detail will find it in the contemporary court reporting rather than in her fiction.
More Victorian crime sits on the Anne Perry hub.
Follow the full ordered path here: Anne Perry books in order: where to start with Pitt and Monk.
