Acceptable Loss

Acceptable Loss begins when a small-time criminal washes up on the bank of the Thames wearing an elegant scarf, an accessory that suggests a much wealthier hand in his death. Monk's investigation leads to a floating house of horrors on the river where children have been kept captive for men of substance, and then to the delicate legal question of whether justice for the victims requires prosecuting someone who, in another sense, already did the right thing.

Ralph Lister's narration gives the novel its appropriately somber moral weight. The Victorian London he constructs in his voice moves from the river's working-class dangers to the drawing rooms of the wealthy without losing the fundamental horror at the story's center. The courtroom climax, which puts Monk's friendship with Oliver Rathbone under direct strain, is handled with the tension Perry earned across the novel's preparation.