Bethlehem Road by Anne Perry

I reread this book recently and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. It is one of Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt series and it deals with the police investigation into the murder of three members of parliament on Westminster Bridge. Each man was found with his throat cut and tied to a lamp post and in each case the murderer had been able to vanish unnoticed from the scene laving the police struggling to find a motive. The general feeling was that it must be an anarchist plot or perhaps the work of a mad man, as the plot developed a tragic and deeply personal motive was revealed.

Anne Perry tackles very uncomfortable issues in her books and she vividly describes the social issues of the time. This book developed my understanding the injustice of the time regarding the treatment of women and for the first time I understood that the fight for women's suffrage was about far more than just getting the vote. It is a haunting story and the issues it raised will not easily be forgotten.