- By Christopher Fowler
- First published: UK: Doubleday, 2012
Third review of the day.
Christopher Fowler died earlier this year, aged 69, from cancer. He wrote more than 20 books featuring his sleuths Bryant and May, the heads of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, described as “Golden Age detectives in a modern world”. The tone is somewhere between the police procedural, Edmund Crispin, and The Avengers.
This one is more of a political thriller than a whodunnit: evil in the Establishment; secret government research; and (possibly) modern day black magic. Not much whodunnit, though. A woman dies in a London church; outside, a couple of children pretend she is a witch, and put a curse on her to kill her. The Albanian wife of Home Office VIP (and Bryant & May’s nemesis) Kasavian believes she is being pursued by devils. Sundry deaths follow. Not the best in the series, but good fun, as always.
Blurb
Two small children are playing a game called ‘Witch-Hunter’. They place a curse on a young woman taking lunch in a church courtyard and wait for her to die. An hour later the woman is indeed found dead inside St Bride’s Church – a building that no-one else has entered.
Unfortunately Bryant & May are refused the case. Instead, there are hired by their greatest enemy to find out why his wife has suddenly started behaving strangely. She’s become an embarrassment to him at government dinners, and he is convinced that someone is trying to drive her insane. She has even taken to covering the mirrors in her apartment, and believes herself to be the victim of witchcraft.
Then a society photographer is stabbed to death in a nearby park and suddenly a link emerges between the two cases. And so begins an investigation that will test the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit to their limits, setting Arthur Bryant off on a trail that leads to Bedlam and Bletchley Park, and into the world of madness, codes and the secret of London’s strangest relic.
As the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit dig behind the city’s facades to expose a world of private clubs, hidden passages and covert loyalties, they realise that the case might not just end in disaster – it might also get everyone killed.
The Grandest Game in the World 