The Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series is the longest work of Anne Perry: 32 Victorian mysteries published between 1979 and 2016, all set in London in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. He is a policeman and a gamekeeper’s son. She is a daughter of a wealthy family who marries him anyway. Between them they can go anywhere in the city.
The series is complete, and it is best read in the order it was published. This guide lists every book with its setting and premise, explains how the series changes when Pitt moves to Special Branch, and suggests where to begin.
This page contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
Quick Series Facts
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Author | Anne Perry |
| Number of books | 32 novels (complete) |
| First book | The Cater Street Hangman (1979) |
| Final book | Murder on the Serpentine (2016) |
| Setting | London, from 1881 to the late 1890s |
| Genre | Historical mystery |
| Spin-off | Daniel Pitt series (7 books) |
Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Books in Publication Order
Years are those of first publication, and some US editions appeared a year later. The list is split into three stages that follow Pitt’s career.
Books 1 to 10: Inspector Pitt
In the first ten novels Pitt is a police inspector, and almost every case begins with a death in a street or square that gives the book its title. These are the drawing-room mysteries the series is best known for.
1. The Cater Street Hangman (1979)
Setting: London, 1881
While the Ellison daughters pay calls and drink tea like proper Victorian ladies, a maid in their household is strangled. Young Inspector Thomas Pitt questions the family and finds that no one is above suspicion. He also finds himself drawn to Charlotte Ellison, at a time when a match between a society girl and a policeman is unthinkable.
2. Callander Square (1980)
Setting: London, Callander Square
Murders are not supposed to happen in fashionable Callander Square, so Charlotte, now Pitt’s wife, cannot resist finding out why one has. She listens to backstairs gossip and rattles the closets of the very rich while her husband works the case from the front door.
3. Paragon Walk (1981)
Setting: London, Paragon Walk
A young woman is raped and murdered in one of London’s smartest streets. Thomas and Charlotte look behind the elegant masks of the well-born residents and find something ugly that could lead to more scandal, and more violence.
4. Resurrection Row (1981)
Setting: London
A corpse is found sitting on the box of a hansom cab on a foggy evening, and it is the body of a peer, Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond, who had been decently buried. The doctor insists the death was natural. Pitt is not so sure, and his inquiries lead him towards greed and exploitation he did not expect.
5. Rutland Place (1983)
Setting: London, Rutland Place
Charlotte’s mother is distressed at losing a locket with a compromising picture inside. The small theft is the first of a chain of strange events in elegant Rutland Place that ends in a sudden death. Charlotte’s persistence and Pitt’s patience are both needed to untangle it.
6. Bluegate Fields (1984)
Setting: London
The body of a young aristocrat is found in a London sewer, and his family refuses to answer police questions. Pitt and Charlotte set out to learn what lies behind the family’s silence.
7. Death in the Devil’s Acre (1985)
Setting: London, 1887
Violent crime is common in the slum known as the Devil’s Acre, but this is different: four men are found murdered and mutilated. Pitt and Charlotte follow the clues from the depths of the slums to the heights of society.
8. Cardington Crescent (1987)
Setting: London, Cardington Crescent
George March, a philandering aristocrat, is found dead over his morning coffee, and his wife is accused of murder. She is Emily, Charlotte’s sister. Thomas and Charlotte take on the outwardly irreproachable March family to clear her.
9. Silence in Hanover Close (1988)
Setting: London, Hanover Close
Pitt reopens the three-year-old murder of a senior Foreign Office official in an exclusive neighbourhood. To help him, Charlotte goes into that world in disguise.
10. Bethlehem Road (1990)
Setting: London, Westminster
Sir Lockwood Hamilton, a well-liked Member of Parliament and a kind family man, is brutally murdered. Pitt investigates and calls on Charlotte to search the drawing rooms of political society for what he cannot find himself.
Books 11 to 20: Towards Bow Street
Pitt rises in rank through these books, to superintendent and to the command of the Bow Street station. The cases reach further into politics, the law and the Church.
11. Highgate Rise (1991)
Setting: London, Highgate
The fine Highgate home of Dr Stephen Shaw is burned to the ground with his wife inside. Thomas and Charlotte have to work out who the fire was meant for, and why.
12. Belgrave Square (1992)
Setting: London
A moneylender named William Weems is murdered, to the quiet relief of the poor people whose earnings he swallowed. Then Pitt finds a list of distinguished London gentlemen in Weems’s office, and the case reaches much higher.
13. Farriers’ Lane (1993)
Setting: London
Mr Justice Stafford dies of opium poisoning. His death brings back to life one of the most sensational murder cases England has seen, a case that was supposed to be closed.
14. The Hyde Park Headsman (1994)
Setting: London, Hyde Park
A killer is beheading people in Hyde Park, and London is frightened. Pitt has just been promoted, and if he cannot find the Headsman quickly he may lose the new job as fast as he got it.
15. Traitors’ Gate (1995)
Setting: London
Someone in the Colonial Office is passing information to Germany about Britain’s strategy in Africa, and Superintendent Pitt is ordered to find the traitor. His mind is elsewhere, on the sudden death of Sir Arthur Desmond, the man who was his mentor in childhood.
16. Pentecost Alley (1996)
Setting: London
The murder of a prostitute would normally cause no stir, but a Hellfire Club badge is found under her body. That pulls Superintendent Pitt into the case, and then into a second killing carried out in the same way.
17. Ashworth Hall (1997)
Setting: Ashworth Hall, an English country house
Irish political figures, Protestant and Catholic, gather at Ashworth Hall in the hope of settling the question of home rule. When a murder shatters the weekend, Superintendent Pitt and Charlotte have to find the killer among the guests.
18. Brunswick Gardens (1998)
Setting: London, Brunswick Gardens
In the household of the Reverend Ramsay Parmenter, the clergyman is at war with his assistant, Unity Bellwood, a “new woman” whose feminism and Darwinism appal him. When Unity falls down the staircase to her death, Pitt, now in command at Bow Street, is close to certain that one of the devout men in the house is responsible.
19. Bedford Square (1999)
Setting: London, Bedford Square
A man is found murdered on the doorstep of a respectable house in Bedford Square. Pitt is called at once, and the question of why the body was left at that particular door drives the case.
20. Half Moon Street (2000)
Setting: London
A dead man drifts down the Thames in a punt at dawn, chained to the boat, dressed in a torn green gown and strewn with flowers. Pitt’s search for his identity leads into bohemian London: the theatre, where the actress Cecily Antrim is outraging society, and the studios of the new art of photography.
Books 21 to 32: Special Branch
From here Pitt works for Special Branch, and the mysteries turn into political thrillers about conspiracy, terrorism and the Crown.
21. The Whitechapel Conspiracy (2001)
Setting: London, Whitechapel
Pitt’s evidence helps convict a distinguished soldier of murder, and powerful people do not forgive him. He is removed from Bow Street and sent to work undercover for Special Branch in the East End. This is the book where the series changes direction.
22. Southampton Row (2002)
Setting: London, Southampton Row
Pitt is kept in Special Branch and set to watch a corrupt man with powerful secret backing who is standing for Parliament. Then a spiritualist medium is murdered in Southampton Row, and the trail from the séance room to the election grows clearer. With Charlotte away for her safety, Pitt turns to her sister Emily for help.
23. Seven Dials (2003)
Setting: London
A diplomat is shot dead and Pitt is called in. Nothing at the scene quite adds up, and he has to walk a diplomatic tightrope between justice, the security of the country and the safety of his own family.
24. Long Spoon Lane (2005)
Setting: London, East End
Early one summer morning two bombs explode in an East London street. Forewarned of an anarchist attack, Pitt chases the bombers to a tenement in Long Spoon Lane, where two men are arrested and one is shot dead. What he finds next is worse than a few misguided idealists: corruption inside the police itself.
25. Buckingham Palace Gardens (2008)
Setting: London, Buckingham Palace
The Prince of Wales has invited four wealthy entrepreneurs and their wives to the palace to discuss a railway that would run the length of Africa. The gathering turns to disaster when the body of a prostitute is found in a linen cupboard. Pitt is summoned in haste, and the Pitts’ maid Gracie goes in as a palace servant to hear what the staff are saying.
26. Betrayal at Lisson Grove (2010)
Setting: London, France and Ireland, 1895
Political unrest is rising across Europe, and Pitt chases a suspect all the way to France. While he is gone, his superior Victor Narraway is accused over the death of an Irish informant and removed from office. Charlotte travels to Ireland with Narraway to help clear his name. The book has also been published as Treason at Lisson Grove.
27. Dorchester Terrace (2011)
Setting: London, 1896
Pitt is newly promoted to head of Special Branch and uncovers the work of a traitor in his own department. Without knowing whom to trust, he must also protect a visiting Austrian duke. Meanwhile Narraway looks into the death of Serafina Monserrat, an old woman who once held many political secrets.
28. Midnight at Marble Arch (2012)
Setting: London, 1896
During a party at the Spanish Embassy, news arrives that the wife of the investor Rawdon Quixwood has been viciously attacked in her own home, by someone she seems to have let in herself. At the same party Charlotte sees an ambassador’s young daughter flinch in fear from a group of young men. The two cases force the Pitts to face how such crimes are judged.
29. Death on Blackheath (2013)
Setting: Greenwich, 1897
Signs of a vicious fight are found outside a house on Shooters Hill: bloodstains and locks of long auburn hair. The house belongs to Dudley Kynaston, a government man with access to sensitive secrets, so the matter comes to Pitt as head of Special Branch.
30. The Angel Court Affair (2014)
Setting: London
Pitt is ordered to protect Sofia, a young woman visiting from Spain who preaches new and, some say, blasphemous religious ideas. He cannot see why this is a job for Special Branch until she vanishes in the night from Angel Court.
31. Treachery at Lancaster Gate (2015)
Setting: London
An explosion kills two policemen and badly injures three more. Many blame anarchists, but Pitt knows the city’s radical groups well enough to suspect a more personal motive, and to see that the bomb was aimed at the police themselves.
32. Murder on the Serpentine (2016)
Setting: London, Hyde Park
Pitt receives a royal summons. Sir John Halberd, a confidant of the Queen, has been found dead in the shallow water of the Serpentine, and at Her Majesty’s request he had been looking into a man with too much influence over the Prince of Wales. This is the last novel in the series.
Chronological Order vs Publication Order
They are the same. The first book is set in 1881, and each novel moves the story forward, reaching 1897 by Death on Blackheath. There are no prequels and no books set out of sequence.
Our recommendation is simple: start with The Cater Street Hangman and read straight through.
Companion Books and the Daniel Pitt Series
The story of the family continues in the Daniel Pitt series, seven novels about Thomas and Charlotte’s son. Daniel is a young lawyer in London from 1910, and the first book is Twenty-One Days. Read it after the Pitt novels, since it assumes you know the parents.
Anne Perry also wrote 21 Christmas novellas, each built around a secondary character from the world of her two Victorian series. They stand alone and can be read at any point. The first is A Christmas Journey. All the titles are listed on the Anne Perry author page.
About the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Series
The idea is easy to state. Thomas Pitt’s father was a gamekeeper on a landed estate, and Thomas was educated alongside the son of the house, so he speaks like a gentleman without being one. He joined the police after his father was wrongly accused of poaching and transported to Australia. Charlotte Ellison comes from the class he investigates, and when she marries him she gives up her place in it.
What she keeps is access. Her sister Emily marries a viscount and later a rising politician, and Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the elderly aunt of Emily’s first husband, becomes a friend to both sisters. Through them Charlotte hears the things that are said over tea and never repeated to a policeman.
What Makes the Series Special
- Two detectives, two worlds. Thomas has the warrant, Charlotte has the invitations, and most cases need both.
- A marriage that lasts. The Pitts stay together for 32 books, raise two children, Jemima and Daniel, and argue like real people.
- Crime as social history. Each murder opens a door on something the Victorians preferred to keep shut: the treatment of servants, the power of moneylenders, the double standard applied to women.
- A series that changes. The move to Special Branch at book 21 turns a set of domestic mysteries into political thrillers without losing the family at its centre.
Where to Start
Start with The Cater Street Hangman. It introduces Thomas and Charlotte before they are a couple, and the rest of the series builds on that first meeting.
If you want to sample the later, political books first, The Whitechapel Conspiracy is the natural second way in, because it resets Pitt’s career and explains the new situation as it goes. You will meet spoilers for the earlier novels, so most readers are better served by beginning at the beginning.
About the Author
Anne Perry was born in London in 1938 and died in Los Angeles in 2023. The Cater Street Hangman was her first published novel, and she went on to write more than 100 books, most of them historical mysteries. Her literary agency, Ki Agency, keeps a full list of her work.
Her second Victorian series, about the detective William Monk, began in 1990 with The Face of a Stranger and runs to 24 books. It is darker than the Pitt series and set earlier in the century. The full list is in the William Monk reading order, and her other series are covered on the Anne Perry author page.
Historical Context: Late Victorian London
The Pitt novels are set in the 1880s and 1890s, when Britain was at the height of its imperial power and London was the largest city in the world. It was also a city of extreme contrasts, where a fashionable square and a slum could be a few minutes’ walk apart. The titles of the books map those contrasts, from Belgrave Square to the Devil’s Acre.
The questions that divided the country run through the plots. Irish home rule is the subject of Ashworth Hall. The quarrel between the Church and Darwin’s ideas drives Brunswick Gardens. Britain’s ambitions in Africa lie behind Traitors’ Gate and Buckingham Palace Gardens, and the fear of anarchist bombs behind Long Spoon Lane and Treachery at Lancaster Gate.
The characters and crimes are invented, and real figures such as the Prince of Wales appear only at the edges. The value of the series as history is in its picture of how class worked, who was believed and who was not. For more novels set in the period, see the Victorian Era hub.
Similar Series You’ll Love
- William Monk by Anne Perry. The same author and the same city, a generation earlier and several shades darker. Start with The Face of a Stranger.
- Shardlake by C.J. Sansom. A lawyer in Tudor London who, like Pitt, serves powerful men he cannot trust. Start with Dissolution.
- Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters. A long, humane series of medieval mysteries, beginning with A Morbid Taste for Bones.
- Giordano Bruno by S.J. Parris. Murder and espionage in Elizabethan England, beginning with Heresy.
- Charles Lenox by Charles Finch. A gentleman detective in Victorian London. The first book is A Beautiful Blue Death.
- Lady Julia Grey by Deanna Raybourn. A Victorian widow and a private inquiry agent, beginning with Silent in the Grave.
- Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. A woman investigator with a strong social conscience, starting with Maisie Dobbs.
There are more ideas in our guide to the best historical mystery fiction.
Adaptations
Only the first novel has been filmed. Ardent Productions made a television film of The Cater Street Hangman in association with Yorkshire Television. It was shown on ITV in Britain on 23 September 1998 and on A&E in the United States, with Eoin McCarthy as Pitt and Keeley Hawes as Charlotte.
The film stays close to the book but softens some of its darker motives and changes the ending slightly. No series followed, so readers who watched it first have 31 more stories to discover.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many books are in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series?
There are 32 novels, from The Cater Street Hangman in 1979 to Murder on the Serpentine in 2016. The series is complete.
In what order should I read the Thomas Pitt books?
Read them in publication order, starting with The Cater Street Hangman. Publication order is also the order of events, so there is no separate chronological list to worry about.
Do I have to read the Pitt books in order?
Each novel has its own murder and its own solution, so a single book can be enjoyed alone. The lives of Thomas, Charlotte, Emily and their circle move forward from book to book, though, and later novels refer back to earlier ones. Reading in order avoids spoilers and gives the series its full weight.
What is the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series about?
It follows Thomas Pitt, a London policeman and the son of a gamekeeper, and his wife Charlotte, who was born into a wealthy family. He has the authority to investigate, and she has the social access to hear what is never said to the police. Together they solve murders among the Victorian upper classes.
When does Thomas Pitt join Special Branch?
In The Whitechapel Conspiracy, the twenty-first novel. He is removed from his post at Bow Street and sent to work for Special Branch in the East End, and from then on the cases involve anarchists, spies and threats to the state. He is head of Special Branch by Dorchester Terrace.
Is Betrayal at Lisson Grove the same book as Treason at Lisson Grove?
Yes. The twenty-sixth novel has been published under both titles. If you are collecting the series, you only need one of them.
Is the Pitt series connected to the William Monk series?
No. Both were written by Anne Perry and both are set in Victorian London, but the characters and stories are separate. The Monk novels are set earlier in the century.
What should I read after the Pitt series?
The Daniel Pitt novels follow Thomas and Charlotte’s son as a young lawyer from 1910, so they are the direct continuation. After that, the William Monk series offers 24 more Victorian mysteries by the same author.
Will there be more Charlotte and Thomas Pitt books?
No. Anne Perry died in April 2023, and Murder on the Serpentine was the final novel in this series.
Has the series been adapted for television?
Only the first book. A television film of The Cater Street Hangman was shown on ITV in Britain on 23 September 1998 and on A&E in the United States, with Eoin McCarthy as Pitt and Keeley Hawes as Charlotte. No series followed.
Are the Pitt books historically accurate?
The murders and the main characters are invented, but the setting is drawn from the real late Victorian world. The books use the debates of the time as their material, among them Irish home rule, Darwin’s ideas, the position of women and the fear of anarchist violence.
Are the Pitt books suitable for younger readers?
They are written for adults. The violence is not graphic, but the subjects include murder, sexual violence, prostitution and abuse of power, treated seriously. Many older teenagers read them without difficulty.
How long does it take to read the whole series?
With 32 full-length novels, a reader who finishes one a month will take a little under three years. Because each book contains a complete mystery, it is an easy series to read in stages, with breaks between.
Conclusion
The Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series offers something few mystery series can: 32 books with one couple, one city and a steady forward movement, from a strangling in Cater Street to a royal summons at the century’s end. The early books are the best drawing-room mysteries Anne Perry wrote, and the later ones show how well the same characters carry a larger story.
Begin with The Cater Street Hangman, and when you reach the end, The Face of a Stranger and the William Monk books are waiting.