The Victoria Vanishes

Change. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about this election year, and the theme has carried overseas to England, where things at the Peculiar Crimes Unit are in a state of transition in Christopher Fowler’s THE VICTORIA VANISHES. The PCU could be shut down, its pathologist has passed on, Detective Arthur Bryant has written a letter of his intent to retire, and his partner Detective John May has a tumor on the wall of his heart.

Taking place mere days after WHITE CORRIDOR, the sixth Bryant & May mystery opens with Bryant wondering if his days of deduction and detection have long passed him by. After all, he’s misplaced the urn of ashes of their colleague he’s supposed to bury and can’t remember where he left him.

The real mystery, however, arises when a lonely, middle-aged woman turns up dead in a crowded bar. Bryant thinks this is interesting, because he believes he was the next-to-last person to see her alive. But why does he think he spotted her at a pub that hasn’t been around for decades? No matter, because PCU can’t take on a case that hasn’t been assigned them.

Then they learn of another woman dead in the same fashion. Two bodies is a coincidence, but three is a trend, and when a third pops up — with more to come — PCU’s various members split up and hit the local bars to find out who’s injecting London’s ladies with a rather public dose of poison.

After seeing them stuck in a car in a snowstorm for most of the last book, it’s nice to watch Bryant and May back in action on the streets of London, especially in what may be the friends’ final case. Fowler’s leads fit like the proverbial glove, their oil-and-water personalities feeling instantly comfortable to any reader of the previous entries. And the love extends to the rest of PCU as well, as each is given his or her own thing to do.

As is evident from the opening page, Fowler’s cheeky sense of humor hasn’t diluted a single iota, and it only gets better as the novel goes on, whether describing one character as having the “ability to start small bin fires with her pre-menstrual temper” or Bryant’s dismissal of a certain soccer star’s pop-tart wife as “the very thin singer with a face like a shaved monkey.”

And the story? The pub-killer plot isn’t the series’ pinnacle, but bravo to one that doesn’t give short shrift to any of the PCU personnel. It’s great to see them work as a team, excessive quirks and all, especially in a conspiracy as thick and chewy as this one. It’s not for nothing that Fowler’s bunch comprises the best mystery series currently active, and much of that merit is earned by the two core characters. How the novel finds them on the closing page is remarkably touching. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• OLD DEVIL MOON by Christopher Fowler
• TEN SECOND STAIRCASE by Christopher Fowler
• THE WATER ROOM by Christopher Fowler
• WHITE CORRIDOR by Christopher Fowler

Related posts:

1. White Corridor
2. Ten Second Staircase
3. The Water Room
4. Old Devil Moon
5. Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural