BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler
Bantam
Mystery
ISBN: 9780553807196
Arthur Bryant and John May are the senior detectives of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Actually, make that the former Peculiar Crimes Unit. The PCU (of which Bryant and May have been members since World War II) has been disbanded --- at least in the de facto sense --- as of the beginning of BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE. Its cases, some of which are documented within the pages of the six volumes that precede this one (and many others that are only alluded to), are the most eccentric that the city of London has ever experienced, equally grounded more often than not in the distant past and the immediate present. The success of the PCU in solving them has become something of an embarrassment to the London police as well.
Then there’s the unique oil and water chemistry of the PCU’s senior detectives. Bryant is unable to remember where his shoes are, yet he can recall the most arcane fact regarding the Roman occupation of Britain, who fought in what war and where, and all the legends that have arisen in their wake. May is more thoroughly grounded in traditional police work. There is no room for either of them in the 21st century. Bryant is more or less put to pasture while the rest of the team finds itself cashiered out as well and begins looking for different work in other fields.
So it is that BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE becomes a perfect jump-on point for those unfamiliar with this excellent series of novels by Christopher Fowler, which combine historical esoteria, sharp characterization and droll humor sprinkled seemingly at a frequency of one chip per paragraph and baked into a puzzling, intriguing mystery. The mystery in this case is the discovery of a headless corpse in the freezer of an abandoned shoppe. The crime is disturbing enough, yet it is the location of the body --- King’s Cross, the British gateway to the 2012 Olympics --- that causes the Metropolitan Police and the British government to consider the unthinkable: the reunion of the PCU.
When yet another headless body is found, accompanied by a detached head belonging to a different corpse --- and on a construction site, no less --- it causes the government to reluctantly (and unofficially) bring the PCU back together. Bryant remains the only holdout, content to live the life of a recluse among his arcane books and almost indescribable souvenirs. But he is drawn back into the thick of things only by the reported sighting of a man dressed as a stag carrying off a young woman. For him, the occurrence relates back to the origins of King’s Cross and, in ways that are clear only to himself, the discovery of the mutilated bodies that threaten to unearth the plans of Europe’s largest commercial developmental renaissance.
And he is right, of course, though not entirely how he originally thought. As Bryant goes from being a reluctant participant to an extremely active pursuer of the truth, the reader is treated to a tour de force of the history and legends of one of the world’s greatest cities, even as the PCU closes in on an extremely dangerous criminal whose intentions are both far more and less than previously believed. A chilling climax provides the PCU not only with one of its greatest successes, but also with its greatest failures.
BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE marks a profound change, even in their reunion, for the PCU. It is safe to say that, by the end of the book, the team, though together, will never be the same again, and at least one member will be unexpectedly single-minded in their pursuit of justice. Now is the time to start reading this unique, addicting and well-written series if you are not doing so already.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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