{"product_id":"peculiar-crimes-unitisbn-9780553385557","title":"Peculiar Crimes Unit","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Traditional mystery buffs with a taste for the offbeat will relish British author Fowler's wonderful second contemporary whodunit featuring the Peculiar Crimes Unit and its elderly odd couple, Arthur Bryant and John May.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow can an elderly recluse \u003ci\u003edrown \u003c\/i\u003ein a chair in her otherwise dry basement? That’s  what John May and Arthur Bryant of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit set out to discover  in a city rife with shady real estate developers, racist threats, dodgy academicians,  and someone dangerously obsessed with Egyptian mythology. Linking them all is an  evil lurking in London’s vast and forgotten underground river system—a killer with  the eerie ability to strike anywhere, anytime, without leaving a clue. It’s a subterranean  case of secrets, lies, and multiple murder that defies not only the law, but reason  itself. Can Bryant and May bring a killer to the surface and stop the dark tide of  murder before it pulls them under, too?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“A clever twist on the traditional police procedural . . . The real thrill here is the delightful duo in the starring roles, two fresh and unusual characters who manage to breathe new life into an established genre in which it’s getting harder and harder to find anything genuinely fresh.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Humorous, engaging.”—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“They’re old, they’re cranky, and their chaotic work habits inevitably lead to disaster. But life always seems livelier whenever Arthur Bryant and John May are on a case!...An imaginative funhouse of a world where sage minds go to expand their vistas and sharpen their wits.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Traditional mystery buffs with a taste for the offbeat will relish British author Fowler's wonderful second contemporary whodunit featuring the Peculiar Crimes Unit and its elderly odd couple, Arthur Bryant and John May.\"—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A clever twist on the traditional police procedural... The real thrill here is the delightful duo in the starring roles, two fresh and unusual characters who manage to breathe new life into an established genre in which it’s getting harder and harder to find anything genuinely fresh.\"—\u003ci\u003eBooklist \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Humorous, engaging.\"—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Entertaining and thrilling.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“More down to earth than [Jasper] Fforde but just as delightfully quirky.” —\u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eChristopher Fowler\u003c\/b\u003e was the acclaimed author of the award-winning Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries: \u003ci\u003eFull Dark House, The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, Ten Second Staircase, White Corridor, The Victoria Vanishes, Bryant \u0026amp; May on the Loose, Bryant \u0026amp; May off the Rails, The Memory of Blood, The Invisible Code, Bryant \u0026amp; May and the Bleeding Heart, Bryant \u0026amp; May and the Burning Man, Bryant \u0026amp; May: Strange Tide, Bryant \u0026amp; May: Wild Chamber, Bryant \u0026amp; May: Hall of Mirrors, Bryant \u0026amp; May: The Lonely Hour, Bryant \u0026amp; May: Oranges \u0026amp; Lemons,  Bryant \u0026amp; May: London Bridge Is Falling Down, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eBryant \u0026amp; May: Peculiar London.\u003c\/i\u003e In 2015 Fowler won the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award in recognition for his body of work. Christopher Fowler died in 2023.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A change in the weather\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Arthur Bryant looked out over London and remembered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fierce sunlight swathed Tower Bridge beyond the rockeries of smouldering bomb-sites.  A Thames sailing barge was arriving in the Pool of London with a cargo of palm kernels.  Its dusty red sails sagged in the afternoon heat as it drifted past Broadway Dock  at Limehouse, like a felucca on the Nile. Dairy horses trotted along the deserted  Embankment, empty milk cans chiming behind them. Children swam from the wharves below  St Paul’s, while carping mothers fanned away stale air from the river steps. He could  smell horse dung and tobacco, meadow grass, the river. The world had once moved forward  in single paces.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The vision wavered and vanished, displaced by sun-flares from the  sealed glass corridors of the new city.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The old man in the unravelling sepia scarf  waited for the rest of the party to gather around him. It was a Saturday afternoon  at the start of October, and London’s thirteen-week heatwave was about to end with  a vengeance. Already, the wind had changed direction, stippling the surface of the  river with grey goose-pimples. Above the spire of St Paul’s, patulous white clouds  deepened to a shade reminiscent of overwashed socks. The enervating swelter was giving  way to a cool breeze, sharp in the shadows. The change had undermined his group’s  stamina, reducing their numbers to a handful, although four polite but puzzled Japanese  boys had joined thinking they were on the Jack the Ripper tour. Once everyone had  settled, the elderly guide began the last section of his talk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘Ladies and gentlemen  . . .’ He gave them the benefit of the doubt. ‘If you would care to gather a little  closer.’ Arthur Bryant raised his voice as a red wall of buses rumbled past. ‘We  are now standing on Blackfriars—formerly Pitt—Bridge.’ Remember to use the hands,  he told himself. Keep their interest. ‘Bridges are causeways across great divides,  in this case the rich city on the north side—’hand usage to indicate north—‘and the  more impoverished south side. Does anyone have a Euro note in their pocket? Take  it out and you’ll find a bridge, the universal symbol for something that unites and  strengthens.’ He paused, less for effect than to catch his breath. Bryant really  had no need to freelance as a city tour guide. His detective duties at the London  Peculiar Crimes Unit would have kept a man half his age working late. But he enjoyed  contact with the innocent public; most of the civilians he met in  his day job were  under criminal suspicion. Explaining the city to strangers calmed him down, even  helped him to understand himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He pulled his ancient scarf tighter and abandoned  his set text. What the hell, they were the last group of the season, and had proven  pretty unresponsive. ‘According to Disraeli,’ he announced, ‘ “London is a nation,  not a city.” “That great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly  drained,” said Conan Doyle. “No duller spectacle on earth than London on a rainy  Sunday afternoon,” according to De Quincey, so take your pick. One of the planet’ s great crossing-points, it has more languages, religions and newspapers than any  other place on earth. We divide into tribes according to age, wealth, class, race,  religion, taste and personality, and this diversity breeds respect.’ Two members  of the group nodded and repeated the word ‘diversity’, like an Oxford Street language  class. God, this lot’s hard work, thought Bryant. I’m gasping for a cup of tea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘London’s main characteristic is an absence of form. Its thirty-three boroughs have  busy districts running through them like veins, with no visible hierarchy, and neighbourhood  ties remain inexplicably close. Because Londoners have a strongly pronounced sense  of home, where you live counts more than who you are.’ Bryant mostly lived inside  his head. Remember the facts, he told himself, they like facts.\u003cbr\u003e fuc\u003cbr\u003e ‘We have six royal  parks, 160 theatres, 8,600 restaurants,  300 museums and around 30,000 shops. Over  3,500 criminal offences are reported every day. Poverty and wealth exist side by  side, often in the same street. Bombings caused slum clearance and social housing,  rupturing centuries-old barriers of class, turning the concept into something mysterious  and ever-shifting. London is truly unknowable.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bryant looked past his under-dressed  audience to the swirling brown river. The Japanese boys were bored and cold, and  had started taking pictures of litter bins. One of them was listening to music. ‘A  city of cruelty and kindness, stupidity and excess, extremes and paradoxes,’ he told  them, raising his voice. ‘Almost half of all journeys through the metropolis are  made on foot. A city of glass, steel, water and flesh that no longer smells of beer  and brick, but piss and engines.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He lifted his silver-capped walking stick to the  sky. ‘The arches of London’s Palladian architecture lift and curve in secular harmonies.  Walls of glass reflect wet pavements in euphonious cascades of rain.’ He was no longer  addressing the group, but voicing his thoughts. ‘We’re heading for winter, when a  caul of sluggishness deepens into thanatomimesis, the state of being mistaken for  death. But the city never dies; it just lies low. Its breath grows shallow in the  cold river air while housebound tenants, flu-ridden and fractious with the perpetual  motion of indoor activity, recover and grow strong once more. London and its people  are parasites trapped in an ever-evolving symbiosis. At night the residents lose  their carapace of gentility, bragging and brawling through the streets. The old London  emerges, dancing drunk skeletons leaving graveyard suburbs to terrify the faint of  heart.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now even the hardiest listeners looked confused. They spoke to each other  in whispers and shook their heads. Their guide seemed to be straying from his topic:  ‘A Historic Thameside Walk’. The Japanese boys gave up and wandered off. Someone  said, rather loudly, ‘This tour was much better last time. There was a café.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bryant  carried on, regardless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘London no longer suffers from the weight of its past. Now  only the faintest resonance of legendary events remains. Oh, I can show you balustrades,  pillars and scrollwork, point out sites of religious and political interest, streets  that have witnessed great events, but to be honest there’s bugger all to see. It’ s impossible to imagine the lives of those who came before us. Our visible history  has been rubbed to a trace, like graffiti scrubbed from Portland stone. London has  reinvented itself more completely than ever. And whoever grows up here becomes a  part of its human history.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He had completely lost his listeners. They were complaining  to each other in dissatisfaction and disarray. ‘That concludes the tour for today,’  he added hastily. ‘I think we’ll skip question time, you’ve been a truly dreadful  audience.’ He decided not to bother with his tip box as the mystified, grumbling  group was forced to disperse across the windy bridge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bryant looked toward the jumble  of outsized apartment buildings being constructed at the edge of the Thames, the  yellow steel cranes clustered around them like praying mantises. After so many years  in the service, he was quick to sense approaching change. Another wave of executives  was colonizing the riverbank, creating a new underclass. He wondered how soon the  invasion would provoke fresh forms of violence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s metabolizing quickly, he thought.  How long before it becomes unrecognizable? How can I hope to understand it for much  longer?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He turned up his collar as he passed the urban surfers of the South Bank  car park. The clatter of their skateboards bounced between the concrete arcades like  the noise of shunting trains. Kids always found ways to occupy ignored spaces. He  emerged into daylight and paced at the river rail, studying the evolving skyline  of the Thames.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Hardly anything left of my childhood memories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Savoy, St Paul’ s, the spire of St Bride’s, a few low monuments palisaded by international banks  as anonymous as cigarette boxes. A city in an apostasy of everything but money. Even  the river had altered. The ships and barges, no longer commercially viable, had left  behind an aorta of bare brown water. Eventually only vast hotels, identical from  Chicago to Bangkok, would remain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As ever, Londoners had found ways of cutting grand  new structures down to human size. The ‘Blade of Light’ connecting St Paul’s to Bankside  had become known as ‘The Wobbly Bridge’. The Swiss Re building had been rechristened  ‘The Erotic Gherkin’ long before its completion. Names were a sign of affection,  to be worn like guild colours. The old marks of London, from its financial institutes  to its market buildings, were fading from view like vanishing coats of arms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’ve  been walking this route for over half a century, Bryant thought, stepping aside for  a wave of shrieking children. A Mexican band was playing in the foyer of the Festival  Hall. People were queueing for an art event involving tall multi-coloured flags.  He remembered walking through the black empty streets after the War, and feeling  completely alone. It was hard to feel alone here now. He missed the sensation.","brand":"Bantam","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302996365541,"sku":"NP9780553385557","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553385557.jpg?v=1730752682","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/peculiar-crimes-unitisbn-9780553385557","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}