Bryant & May

Starred review from September 14, 2020
In Fowler’s outstanding 18th Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery (after 2019’s The Lonely Hour), budget reductions have led to the disbanding of the PCU, a “specialized London police division with a remit to prevent or cause to cease any acts of public affright or violent disorder,” but not for long. The unit’s two senior detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May, are pressed back into service after the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Claremont, is nearly killed when, in an apparent accident, crates of oranges and lemons fell out of a parked van and toppled onto him. That this incident occurred near St. Clement Danes, a London church linked to those fruits in the old English nursery rhyme, leads Home Office higher-ups to fear that Claremont was targeted. Even as Bryant and May try to figure out how the so-called accident could have been planned, more assaults echoing the nursery rhyme occur, all fatal. Fowler again tests his leads with a bizarre series of crimes while devising a satisfying resolution. This long-running series remains as vital as ever. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary.

September 15, 2020
A pair of resurrections as unlikely as they are obligatory kick off the 19th case for London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. Ordinarily the Metropolitan Police would brush off a nonlethal attack on a man about to cross the Strand outside St. Clements Church. But since the victim is Michael Claremont, Speaker of the House of Commons, every resource must be expended to solve the case of "a very important political figure...buried under a pile of fruit." That means reviving the Peculiar Crimes Unit once more, this time as its furniture is being carted out of its Kings Cross headquarters. Fortunately, senior detective John May, left for dead at the end of Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour (2019), makes an equally miraculous recovery, and he soon makes peace with senior detective Arthur Bryant, whose memory for recherche trivia and lack of social graces are equally elephantine. PCU chief Raymond Land, long out of patience with Bryant and May, is further aggrieved when Home Office liaison Timothy Floris is seconded to spy on the unit. Egged on by the suicide of Cristian Albu, held in the custody of police officers convinced he burned the little bookstore he owned to the ground, Bryant quickly postulates that the attack on the Speaker is only the first in an unfolding pattern, and more victims follow with gratifying predictability, all meeting agreeably ghoulish ends to satisfy an unusually long-held grudge. The mystery is so-so; the real star is London, reconfigured as the world's most frazzling amusement park.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.