2008 police procedural mystery/horror, sixth in the Bryant and May
series. Women are being murdered in pubs, in a weird way. Bryant saw
one of them before she died, but even the pub she went into isn't
there any more…
It's still not great, but it's definitely a step up from White
Corridor, the previous book. The unit is threatened with being shut
down yet again, but this time rather than teasing us with it Fowler
actually allows it to happen (though now we know there are more books
to come). The murderer is found, but that isn't at all the whole
story. There's a pleasing blend of good honest police work with
Bryant's sideways approach to things.
But I've been in most of the pubs Fowler mentions, and he doesn't ever
seem to catch the atmosphere, particularly the smells: a pub is just a
pub, it seems, unless it has specific sorts of weird people in it.
Bryant is still annoying, casually offending people to no gain just
because he's an old white man and can get away with it. Some of the
other regulars are a bit more interesting, though none of their
ongoing plots gets anything like a resolution. One external recurring
character is brought into the unit, and while we're clearly meant to
like him better as we get to know him the result really isn't
consistent with the person he was before. The evidence gets
increasingly and pleasingly baroque, but when all is revealed it's
inevitably a disappointment, and the actions that started the
investigation make very little sense in terms of the villains' overall
goals. The idea that any woman unable to have children of her own
must have a maternal instinct that will make her happy to look after
a baby, well.
And there are the little stabby misuses of language that continue to
annoy (and presumably Fowler was by this point too successful to
submit to editing).
"When it comes to the lost icons of antiquity, you have a gullible
buyers' market and plenty of unscrupulous salesmen willing to feed
it."
No, the point is that it's a sellers' market, i.e. it's good for the
sellers.
The pair followed a rough ziggurat back along Bryant's route
I just don't know what this is meant to be, unless perhaps "zig-zag".
I still don't love the series, but I'm at least re-engaged enough to
want to continue with it.
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