Perry's `Shifting Tide' flows with underworld intrigue

The Shifting Tide
By Anne Perry
Ballantine, 328 pp., $25.95

Could Anne Perry be tiring of crime?

In "The Shifting Tide," her 14th William Monk mystery, the Scotland-based doyenne of Victorian British mysteries seems less interested in criminal cases than in the dangerous London underworld her characters must traverse to solve them.

To her credit, the author seems aware of this weariness and seeks to counter it by putting her protagonist -- the proud and prickly Monk -- in a strange environment: the Thames riverside. Although the river runs through the London that Monk knows so well, the waterfront docks and moored ships, with their own subcultures of crime, corruption, and poverty, are presented as a foreign environment he must master.

He's under pressure to learn quickly, too. As this book opens, Monk and his wife, Hester, are facing financial difficulties. Since he's left the police force to work as a private agent of inquiry, his income hasn't been steady, Hester's given up professional nursing to run a shelter for prostitutes, and before long their occasional benefactor (and financial fallback), the wealthy Callandra Daviot, announces her immediate and permanent departure for Vienna. With these pressures, Monk counts himself lucky to have been hired by a wealthy ship owner, Clement Louvain, who seeks the return of a stolen cargo of ivory. But Louvain needs the ivory returned quickly and quietly: He already has a buyer for it, and he seems to be afraid that if word of the theft gets out his reputation will be ruined. Monk, who has exorcised his own dark secrets in the series' earlier volumes, suspects that Louvain is not telling him the entire truth early on, and dislikes that his employer cares more about the missing cargo than the seaman who was found dead at the scene. But even when Monk uncovers the brutal rivalries that may be behind the loss of the ship's cargo, he has little choice. "Monk would have dearly liked to decline the case," the author tells us, before outlining his current need.

Perhaps this same dislike of both crime and employer is what makes the author skimp on the usual details of crime solving that have made her other books so enjoyable. Although it dominates the first third of the book, the theft is clearly not the main story here, and Perry seems eager to get through it. Instead of clues, we're given convenient informants -- the young beggar, Scuff, for example, who in return for a hot lunch tells Monk about the receivers -- dealers in stolen goods -- who are likely involved. Although young Scuff, a colorful character, mentions several such receivers, he ultimately steers Monk toward Little Lil Fosdyke.

It's a sign of Perry's laziness that Little Lil, as she's known, turns out to be the correct party, with no false leads or even real detecting necessary. That Little Lil immediately takes to Monk is another false note, despite an attempt to play it as a recognition of Monk's more wolfish tendencies, the ones our now civilized protagonist (the result of the first volumes' more compelling trials) would prefer to play down.

Worse, instead of Perry's usually acute personality profiles, the kind of self-revealing details that have made very mixed characters like Monk sympathetic, we're fobbed off with easy explanations. "He resented Louvain because he had the power to cause him acute discomfort," she writes of Monk.

Wouldn't that have been better demonstrated than spelled out? Hester, even before her own drama begins, is portrayed in a subtler way. Her observations are given in a matter-of-fact fashion, her thought process simply shown. Greeting the clinic's maid, Bessie, who has been laboring without sleep, Hester knows better than to coddle her. " `Been up all night?' Hester said, more as a statement than a question."

Just as she is in Monk's life, Hester provides the emotional heart of this book. Overall, it does much better with her story than his, particularly once the crime becomes secondary to a more personal crisis -- a health risk that keeps Hester quarantined in her clinic and has Monk nearly mad with anxiety. Jumping back and forth between their two necessarily separated realities, Perry recaptures much of her former charm. Hester, closed in with her upper-class volunteers, her patients, and the street women healthy enough to help out, is sitting on a pressure cooker. In addition to fear of the disease and the inevitable personality conflicts, there's a mystery surrounding the original patient -- a wildly ill but still feisty beauty named Ruth Clark.

As Hester's situation worsens, Monk finally gets a mystery that engages him, even if it's not a paying one. To stop a disastrous epidemic, he must track down the origins of the dread disease. Because his wealthy client had brought the mysterious Clark to Hester's clinic, he knows the answer lies somewhere on the waterfront. But he's still uncertain as to how to proceed, and his desperate search to uncover the truth takes on a fevered intensity. "Action would drive the horror back," he realizes, " . . . at least until exhaustion made him too weak to resist." With all his happiness at stake, Monk takes to the river in earnest, and Perry finally takes us along for the ride.