In this exhilarating series debut, police detective William Monk must solve the mystery of his own past.
His name, they tell him, is William Monk, and he is a London police detective. But the accident that felled him has left him with only half a life; his memory and his entire past have vanished. As he tries to hide the truth, Monk returns to work and is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a Crimean War hero and man about town....

In a London hospital, Prudence Barrymore, a talented nurse who had once been the one of Florence Nightingale's angels of mercy in the Crimean War, meets sudden death by strangulation. Private inquiry agent William Monk is engaged to investigate this horrific crime--which intuition tells him was no random stroke of violence by a madman. Greatly helped by his unconventional friend Hester Latterly, another of Miss Nightingale's nurses, and barrister...

Reluctantly accepting an assignment to investigate an ivory cargo theft along the Thames, Victorian sleuth William Monk wonders why his client elected not to report the crime to police.

When a thirteen-year-old boy is found floating in the river Thames with his throat slit, William Monk, superintendent of the Thames River Police, pursues a child pornographer who runs a sex ring using small boys. Monk's wife Hester and several memorable characters from Dark Assassin return in this richly complex story.

Monk discovers a shocking truth while investigating the murder of a high-end prostitute with ties to an opium-dispensing doctor's widow.

"Though Monk is witness to the terrible bombing of an afternoon pleasure boat on the river that leaves 200 people dead, much to his dismay the case is taken from his hands and given over to the commissioner of police. An Egyptian man is quickly caught, tried, and sentenced to death--and then just as swiftly murdered in prison. When evidence surfaces that proves the dead man innocent, the case is handed back to Monk, who must now rely on his own memory...

When William Monk's wife, Hester, is kidnapped from the hospital where she volunteers, Monk is desperate to rescue her. But when his investigation leads him to the remote home of the wealthy and enigmatic Bryson Radnor--and to several bodies buried on his grounds--Monk realizes there is far more to Hester's kidnapping than meets the eye. What did Hester learn that made her a danger to Radnor? What are the two doctors Hester was working with at the...