Quirky detail and a page-turning plot combine as British fiction's most enigmatic detectives since Holmes and Watson search for a murderer
One night, Arthur Bryant witnesses a drunk middle-aged lady coming out of a pub in a London backstreet. The next morning, she is found dead at the exact spot where their paths crossed. Even more disturbing, the pub has vanished. Bryant is convinced that he saw them as they were over a century before, but the elderly detective has already lost the funeral urn of an old friend. Could he be losing his mind as well?
Then it becomes clear that a number of women have met their ends in London pubs. It seems a silent, secret killer is at work, striking in full view...and yet nobody has a clue how, or why - or where he’ll attack next. The likeliest suspect seems to be a mental patient with a reason for killing. But knowing who the killer is and catching him are two very different propositions.
As their new team at the Peculiar Crimes Unit goes in search of a madman, the octogenarian detectives ready themselves for the pub crawl of a lifetime, and come face to face with their own mortality…
Author ProfileChristopher Fowler is the author of five further acclaimed Bryant & May mysteries including
Full Dark House, which won the BFS August Derleth Award for Best Novel, and
The Water Room, nominated for the CWA People’s Choice Dagger Award and the August Derleth Award. He has also written several other novels and an autobiography,
Paper Boy. He lives in King's Cross, London.
ReviewsFowler's latest bears all the hallmarks of the classic British mystery - think Edmund Crispin's 1946 novel
The Moving Toyshop, but much funnier and more distinctive, with plenty of mordant humour, fascinating trivia about London past and present, and the basis for an epic pub crawl of your own. What more could you want?,The most endearing pair of old farts in crime fiction
