It’s a crime tailor-made for the Peculiar Crimes Unit: a controversial artist is murdered and displayed as part of her own outrageous installation. No suspects, no motive, no evidence—but this time they do have an eyewitness. A twelve-year-old claims the killer was a cape-clad highwayman atop a black stallion. Whoever the killer really is, he seems intent on killing off enough minor celebrities to become one himself. As“Highwayman Fever” grips London, Bryant and May, along with the newest member of the Unit, May’s agoraphobic granddaughter, April, find themselves sorting out a case involving artistic rivalries, sleazy sex affairs, the Knights Templars, feuding street gangs, and a decades-old crime spree that split up their partnership once before—and threatens to end it again...with murder**.**
From Publishers Weekly
After the somewhat disappointing Seventy-seven Clocks (2005), British author Fowler smoothly blends humor, deduction and social commentary in his fourth oddball whodunit to pay homage to John Dickson Carr and other golden age masters of the impossible crime story. Besides matching a bizarre series of crimes with a logical and plausible fair-play solution, the novel features a high level of psychological complexity, especially in its detectives, the elderly eccentrics Arthur Bryant (who clearly channels Carr's brilliant curmudgeon, Sir Henry Merrivale) and John May. With the pair's beloved Peculiar Crimes Unit on the brink of extinction, Bryant and May must both resolve a cold case featuring the Leicester Square Vampire, whose victims included May's own daughter, and identify the Highwayman, who specializes in locked-room murders of hated celebrities. Far superior to the author's best earlier work, this fine effort places Fowler in the first rank of contemporary mystery writers and whets the appetite for the next Bryant and May case. (July)
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From Booklist
Starred Review Old age can't stop cantankerous detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, the most senior members of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. The quirky division, whose unorthodox methods have long made it the bane of the city's Metropolitan Police force, takes pride in tackling fiendishly clever crimes. Their latest doozy of a case concerns the murder of a controversial performance artist whose body was placed in her latest works of art: a 12-foot-high tank of liquid containing six aborted fetuses. Absentminded throwbacks Bryant and May make a most amusing pair: May, whose weakness for married women is rivaled only by his adoration for his agoraphobic granddaughter, and Bryant, disheveled, disorganized, and devoted to peculiar sources, including practitioners of black magic. More murders (a B-list celebrity electrocuted on an exercise machine, a pedophile showered with petrol and set on fire) put the two no closer to solving the case, whose suspects include members of a teen street gang and a mysterious cloaked figure sporting a tricorn hat and black mask. Meanwhile, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, still haunted by the unsolved matter of the Leicester Square Vampire, must prove itself worthy before cost-cutting bureaucrats shut the division down for good. This fourth Bryant and May novel delivers a delirious blend of black humor and suspense--recommend it to readers looking for something different in an English procedural. Allison Block
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