WHITE CORRIDOR: A Bryant & May Mystery
Christopher Fowler
Bantam
Mystery
ISBN-10: 0553804502
ISBN-13: 9780553804508

I am probably too old to be using the term "sense of wonder," but I will when discussing Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May mysteries. Arthur Bryant and John May are well past retirement age, yet somehow they continue working as senior detectives for London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. The eccentric Bryant and enigmatic May are perfectly and at once matched and mismatched, and the crimes that their creator invents for them and their similarly strange co-workers to solve are such clever variations on a theme that one is usually enthralled within just a few pages of the beginning of the book.

WHITE CORRIDOR, the fifth installment in the Bryant & May series, differs somewhat from its predecessors in that the mysteries confronting the two protagonists are not linked to one of their cases from the past but rather are firmly grounded in the present. The circumstances surrounding the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit are chaotic, to say the least, what with the imminent retirement of Unit Pathologist Oswald Finch, an unexpected tour from visiting royalty (which is crafted to shut down the PCU forever) and the closing of headquarters for one week while its wiring is brought up to 21st-century standards. Bryant schedules a weekend frolic of his own --- all too typically a convention of psychics --- dragging an extremely reluctant May along with him.

Naturally, everything that can go wrong does. A member of the PCU is found murdered in a locked room on-site, and at least one fellow member had motive and opportunity to commit the crime. Meanwhile, Bryant and May find themselves stuck in their van in the middle of a snowstorm in the Dartmouth countryside, even as a shadowy murderer prowls the landscape around them, wreaking terror on other trapped motorists. Bryant and May accordingly are challenged with double duty, attempting to solve one crime while tackling the other via cell phone, even as the PCU faces their gravest threat yet to being disbanded.

Both plot- and character-driven, WHITE CORRIDOR demonstrates that Fowler has no intention of letting this imaginatively conceived and craftily written series succumb to formulaic familiarity. One never knows from page to page what Bryant will do or say. And May? Even as he plays foible to Bryant, it appears from hints dropped in the book that May has enough secrets to keep the series going for years. If you haven't jumped on the Bryant & May train yet, now is the time to familiarize yourself with a series that is on its way to becoming an institution.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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