2007 police procedural mystery/horror, fourth in the Bryant and May
series. Someone is killing celebrities by various baroque means; the
Peculiar Crimes Unit balances that investigation with an attempt to
prevent the unit being shut down.
Again. This is clearly a hard balance to strike in a series; on
the one hand you want to have recurring themes because if not what’s
the point of having a series at all, but on the other hand you don’t
want to be samey. And for me the supposed tension generated by
trotting out the “will the unit be closed down” plot element yet again
fell flat, just as it would if Fowler tried to get me to think that
the principals’ lives were at risk; as a reader I know that this is an
ongoing series. The things that generate effective tension are the
smaller ones: yes, the leads will live and the unit will go on, but
what will it cost them to crack the case? Who else will suffer on the
way to a solution?
What I’d have liked to see instead is what was hinted at in the
opening chapters: the unit has had a recent success, and is
completely unused to public acclaim, so how do its people deal with
that?
At least this time there isn’t a secondary narrative about a young
woman on the edges of the case conducting her own investigation, as
there was in the last two books; though May’s granddaughter April,
finally (after three books of hinting) turning up for a job with the
unit, does a bit of this late in the day.
The main plot feels like self-parody at times: as usual, Bryant makes
irrelevant connections to London’s psychogeography, but this time it
turns out that rirelguvat jnf frg hc qryvorengryl ol gur hatbqyl va
beqre gb yher uvz qbja snyfr genvyf. I was thoroughly unconvinced by
the identity and motivation of the killer; yes, on the one hand it
accounted for the victims and the modes of murder, but it raised
questions of knowledge and capacity that I felt were not even
considered, never mind answered.
A more compelling narrative might have carried me over these problems,
but even for an audiobook this seemed slow-paced and sometimes
laboured. It didn't help that I was able to put together the basic
idea of what was going on quite quickly, which always makes the
characters in the story who don't get it look stupid; and while I did
like the meditations on the tensions of being young in a world of
end-stage capitalism, they didn't go anywhere. Well, not that they
could, I suppose, without the author having an answer for society, but
it all just felt wasted.
(And everyone’s always “flipping” open their phones. What’s up with
that? The predominant form factor for mobile phones in 2007, just
pre-iPhone, was the one-piece “candybar” without flip or slider.)
I still enjoy the series, but I think it's at its best when it dives
into its arcana (by tying them to characters' motivations; there may
be no actual magic in this world, but there are people who believe in
it and act accordingly) rather than just dumping “here's all this
stuff I found in old books”.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.