“Everything I tell you is a lie.” With this opening sentence, you are drawn into the King’s Cross London Peculiar Crimes Unit on the verge of being closed down.
Suddenly, a crime occurs that puts them on the burner of solve it if you can or pack it in.
The team is an odd assortment-erudite and arcane- of the competent, the seemingly incompetent, a watchdog, a techie newbie, long-timers and two old friends Bryant & May, who are so out of step with each other that they actually fill each other’s holes to create a perfect team.
The first crime becomes another and another, a collection of murders with undecipherable clues focused on the “Oranges and Lemons” game based on the children’s rhyme “London Bells”.
The reader becomes immersed in Old London and church history, architecture, science, technology, psychology, bookselling, the privileged, the users and the used, politics and police procedurals-enlightened madness.
The writing is full of quips, aphorisms, and alliteration. As a teacher, a highlight was the lengthy passage mocking standardized testing, when Bryant & May are required to pass a 36 page mental competency test.
My sentiments exactly!
In short, a gem of a read.
I am an avid reader of detective and police procedurals with quite a series list of favorite main characters.
I don’t know how I missed Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May, but I see there are 17 others! And More to Come it seems.

I have had the sure joy of reading the entire corpus of the Bryant & May series of peculiar crimes set in-and-around London England. And “peculiar crimes” is an apt description since Mr. Arthur Bryant and his able sidekick John May are the lead detectives of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Bryant is the quirky to end all quirky characters and is surrounded by his mates in the crime unit plus his extremely quirky friends. Putting the plot of this narrative aside — enjoy this newest adventure! - I have enjoyed getting to know these characters through the ups-and-downs of their lives. This time around I felt as if the wandering thoughts and meanderings of Bryant got close to the line of parody: for instance, a scene involving a meeting in a fancy restaurant that reminded one of the scene where the Blues Brothers walk into a five-star restaurant and hoist all the fuddy-daddies on their ample petards.
Yet I shall remain a devoted fan who enjoys Fowler’s world in all its wondrous details. Don’t wreck a great ride by making this your first book in the series. Head on back to the first book and fasten your seat belt, raise your seat backs to their full and upright position, turn on your e-reader, put on your noise cancelling headphones, and enjoy the quirky Bryant & May series.
Thanks to NetGalley for the Advanced Reader Copy of “Bryant & May, Oranges and Lemons” in return for my thoughts on the book.

This was a great mystery! Beautifully written, complex, full of humor and entertaining characters, ingenious, I highly recommend it!

Still Going Strong

In our house the big three are Reginald Hill, Louise Penny, and Christopher Fowler. But hands down, the new book we most look forward to is the next Bryant & May. Well, here it is, and it does not disappoint. Our heroes are in top form, the tale is twisty, and the whole project is still fresh and engaging. A fine entry in the series.

Number 17 in the ever enlightening, ever entertaining Bryant & May series. In this episode, the Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) — finally tipped over the brink of being shut down permanently — is “temporarily” reinstated to solve a series of high profile murders that appear to be following the verses of the age old children’s nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons.”

As always, the writing has me in stitches as well as completely gripped by the story. We have an intriguing new character — Sydney — who when queried about whether or not she is “on the spectrum” responds that she prefers to think of herself as “over the rainbow.” When accused of being offended by something, she responds “It’s the millennials who take offense. I’m Generation Z.” I love her. Each of the misfits of the PCU is bursting with an off-canter personality of some sort, especially Arthur Bryant who dwells happily in the arcana of existential English history and alternate forms of knowledge.

And also as always, I never saw the end coming until it smacked me in the face.

This is a unique mystery series — I’ve never read another one quite like it.

Everything about this book was mesmerizing, Christopher Fowler creates a fantastical world with eccentric characters I also felt like I was part of the PCU team. All his PCU novels are fresh and unique. With all his exceptional ingenuity, the author manages to incorporate the troubling attributes of today’s world to give you an immersive experience.

It would be great to see a TV series based on his novels..

I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for an advanced ecopy to evaluate.