What a disappointment. I was looking forward to Anne Perry's new series, hoping for another set of lively characters and satisfying stories, driven by good writing and informed by history and period details.But the most charitable thing I can find to say about this book is that perhaps it will have been worth slogging through if it sets up better plotting and characterization in the rest of the books in the series. It certainly doesn't stand alone as a novel: despite its 300+ page length, it's populated with paper-thin characters, some of whom appear only once and to no purpose, carry on interminable and uninteresting conversations (or internal monologues) that fail to advance the extremely flimsy plot, which HAS NO PAYOFF.This book felt like Perry has become so enamored of her own prose style (which is, as ever, exemplary) that she's forgotten to give us people and a mystery (or at least a story) to care about.