Enjoyable but not as good as I've come to expect from Fowler.As the series goes on, the plots are getting more implausible. The Bryant & May books have always been weird with a touch of the fantastic, it's their special charme, but I get the feeling that Fowler is somehow loosing himself in more and more arcane research and plot-twists, and as a result the narrative is beginning to get uneven, with several places where the pacing is off. It's still a very entertaining book but it lacks the stead...

Where to start with the problems? The characters were trite and overblown. The dialog was the same for everyone--more than once I had to resort to counting quotation marks to figure out who was speaking. If that weren't bad enough, there were some atrocious mistakes. For example, at one point an office is first described as being in the area of a building where there was "no direct access to sunlight." In the same paragraph, just three sentences later, there's this: "Kasavian was standing at the...

Recently I have given up super scary mysteries that keep me awake at night. And I also need to like my detectives or general mystery solvers. Of course I always love Brunetti (Donna Leone's Viennese man) but I have recently discovered the books by Christopher Fowler about the Peculiar Crimes Unit of the London Police and its eccentric lead man Arthur Bryant. Bryant's methods are original and the characters that he visits to help him solve crimes are crazy--to say the least. There is a straight m...

A wonderfully quirky mystery, set in London, and featuring two 'elderly' detectives, John May and Arthur Bryant. I love this series! (Read only two so far.) Detectives May and Bryant should have been put out to pasture years and years ago - and yes I can say that as I'm of the age, too - and yet they keep on working out of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a group established to work on crimes which might be overlooked, are weird or have the potential to harm someone important (or vital to the nation's

Written as a pair with Deathworld Deathworld I admit it. Harry Harrison's bad style irritated me. For a while. Mainly it was these. The short sentences. If you can call them that. Sentences.I did manage after some encouragement from the ranks to get over that and I'm glad I did. It's a good bad-book. The Wildside edition I read was horribly proofread, but not nearly as badly as the academic books I've been reading lately. Nothing, at any rate, that distracted me from a punchy story, good charact...

This series just rolls along with more and more weird people and events. Blakeys on shoes, my great great grandmother's maiden name as Colin Bimsley's middle one. Hah! The logic behind the murder is usually a fairly illogical thing and it is in this one too, but it's the getting there that is the treat, the drifting through museums like the Soane and the City of London and the keeping up with the lives of the characters that create such pleasure. Knowing what we do about him it was satisfying to...

I quite liked the journey with all its weird and mystical loose ends, but honestly! The last red herring was just too big to be true and the revelation truly laughable. Like a last minute decision.

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It was better than I remember it. A well written fun series. Bryant and May are a wonderful duo of detectives heading the Peculiar Crimes Unit. In this book they charge around London following myths, legends and intuition with quirkiness and determination to keep the Great British public safe.Highly recommend and looking forward to #11 in the series

I love the Bryant and May series but this one just didnt hit the spot. The big reveal at the end just seemed rushed as though Fowler changed his mind about the plot. 3.5I missed the banter between B &M as well, it all seemed a bit forced. Not one of his best.

This one completely held my attention and was fascinating. It will be interesting to see what the fall out will be in the upcoming story. Christopher Fowler really Knows London and I love his sense of humour. This series is such a delight, and this one was particularly good.

I have now read the most recent of the Bryant & May Peculiar Crimes books and also have a new favorite in the series. In this episode, the team are called in by their Home Office arch nemesis, Oskar Kasavian, to find out why his wife is behaving so irrationally. Needless to say. the case leads in multiple directions, all about London, into the past of the city and British history (as well as religious and mythological esoterica).Fowler's plotting continues to get tighter and the writing about Lo...

The words "humorous" and "murder" don't usually go together but author Christopher Fowler makes it work for his readers in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series. The PCU is located in London and is constantly moving from one dilapidated building to another as the police and Home Office are always trying to shut them down since they do not follow police procedures. Headed by the comically inept Raymond Land, who has been in an acting position since the series began, the real powers are Bryant and May,

Our two elderly heroes, London Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, with their Peculiar Crimes Unit, (PCU), are back in their 10th adventure. As their name suggests, the PCU is tasked with solving Peculiar Crimes using peculiar investigative tactics Bryant is the curmudgeon - unconventional, eschewing technology and “progress”. He has the air of the eccentric, absent minded professor about him – if you are familiar with the TV show The Big Bang Theory, he could be Sheldon’s grandfather. He can...

I will start by saying the overall core mystery in this book isn’t bad. It has some interesting twists to it, although the “ah-ha” moment where the facts are reveled do not stand up to scrutiny of the original passages of past events. When the “real” way an event in the book went down is revealed, it in really doesn’t resemble what the reader actually experienced. That however isn’t too big of detraction since that is not so unusual in mystery books and it is the journey and not the re-read that...

So glad for the opportunity to once again enter the world of Bryant and Mays, two elderly detectives, much maligned for their unorthodox ways, particularly Bryant whose ways of thinking cannot easily be discerned, and the other members that make up the Peculiar Crime Division.For once they find themselves in the position of trying to help the man who most often wants to shut them down, Oskar, their boss and main critic. Fowler has mastered his craft, has come up with a winning combination of hum...

Tenth in the Bryant & May detective mystery series (a.k.a., Peculiar Crimes Unit) set in London and revolving around two too-old detectives who refuse to retire and who have their own way of doing things.My TakePer usual, Fowler begins with a memo for the bulletin board. I do enjoy the "staff roster" introducing us to the characters in the PCU by name and Land’s descriptions via the memo. His annoyance with Bryant, lol, is priceless."May I remind you that you are British officers of the law, and...

Most peculiar…Detectives Bryant and May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are called in to investigate when a young woman is found dead in a church. There is no obvious cause of death, so they have to decide whether this was murder – or was she the victim of some spooky supernatural…er…something. Meantime, their boss and archenemy Oskar Kasavian asks them to help find out why his wife seems to be going mad – because that’s always something you would ask the police to look into, isn’t it? Psychics, sha...

I stumbled upon this gem under the new books section-- having never read anything by this author. This is the 10th book in a series of mysteries solved by the Peculiar Crimes Unit in London. Instead of sexy leading men or women we have a group of aging but very smart men and women who have to sort mysteries dealing with murder, deception,a bit of the arcane and a bit of politics. Don't let the cover of the books fool you--you are entering into other forms of witch hunting. With this many plot tw...

IT IS easy to envy the reader who had yet to encounter Bryan & May, the splendid old codgers who work for the Peculiar Crimes Unit in London. And if you have never heard of this particular branch of the Metropolitan Police, that is because it is the invention of Christopher Fowler.What undiscovered joys await such a lucky reader, for there are nine other Bryant & May mysteries – all of them great fun, enjoyably preposterous yet copper-bottomed with pieces of historical fact.In The Invisible Code...