Anyone else got into Anne Perry books without any knowledge of who she was, look her up after and then instantly want to stop reading her books after finding out what she did?

By bookishSail1997

At my local library, if you go to the thriller section and hit the part where the authors are filed under “P,” it’s basically all taken up by two names. James Patterson is one of them, and I’ve read a few things before—some are great, some were kind of meh for me. The other is Anne Perry. I’d always seen her books there and honestly just assumed she must be wildly popular, but I never really grabbed them when browsing because they’re mostly Victorian-era stuff. I don’t know that history super well, so I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. Then I noticed she had a few that were set around the lead-up to World War II, which is a time period I actually like. I’d already finished some historical fiction from Rory Clements in that same general window, and I enjoyed it—his main character was a guy, though. Anne Perry’s were centered on a female lead, so I figured I’d try her. And I ended up really liking it. The details about the time felt super researched, and even though I already knew some context going in, it still worked. The characters and plot were also gripping in a very thriller kind of way, and the writing was just vivid. I literally kept going—book two was right there on the shelf, then book three too. I even checked the inside cover to make sure I was reading in the right order. I didn’t know if there was a book four at the time, since it wasn’t sitting there, so I looked her up. Her Wikipedia thing kind of hit me over the head with “Anne Perry was a British writer and murderer.” I read it and just felt sick. As a teenager, she and her best friend killed the friend’s mother in a park—bludgeoning her face with a brick, and it sounds like they planned it. The more I read, the more it seemed like there were major delusions and basically zero remorse. Then she changed her name and kept publishing under the new identity, already getting bestseller status, and only got exposed decades later when a movie was being made. Now I feel weird about continuing her series. She’s clearly a talented writer, but knowing what she did—and that she became famous writing fiction involving murder—just leaves a really bad taste for me as a reader.