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Title: Not much mystery here
Review: I've been reading Anne Perry's novels since she started writing them. Maybe I've simply outgrown them, and the Victorian mores that I found fascinating decades ago have palled. I found myself skimming over the tedious insights into the complex emotions of the various characters that fill so many long paragraphs. Defend and Betray seemed to plod on forever. The motivation for the murder was apparent to me long before Hester and Monk figured it out, probably only a third of the way through.I had only read one book of the Monk series prior this, and that was several years ago. That distance in time, along with the ensemble approach - Monk, Hester and Rathbone - to solving the mystery in Defend and Betray, perhaps kept me from being interested in the back story of Monk's former love. Had I not been reading Defend and Betray for book club, I probably would not have stuck it out to the courtroom scenes where the dialogue between canny lawyers and witnesses somewhat redeemed the book.
