The Victoria Vanishes, by Christopher Fowler, $24. Arthur Bryant has just turned in his resignation from the Peculiar Crimes Unit and is making his way home from the funeral of a colleague when he chances to see a woman enter a pub — a commonplace enough occurrence, except that she is about to become the latest victim of a serial killer who is targeting middle-aged women at London’s oldest watering holes.
And it’s made even more uncommon by the fact that the pub he sees the woman enter, the Victoria Cross, was torn down 80 years earlier.
For readers unfamiliar with this ingenious and gloriously old-fashioned series, each installment has featured an impossible crime that is solved by two ancient but brilliant senior detectives, the cranky and crafty Arthur Bryant and the slightly younger and far more personable John May, whose close and long-lasting friendship is central to all the stories.
Here May, who has just been diagnosed with a heart tumor, is hurt that his old friend has not informed him of his decision to retire, even though they both can see that Bryant is rapidly declining. But he’s still more than a match for whatever challenges come his way, and he and May (and a brilliant cast of supporting characters) eventually piece together another bizarre and complicated puzzle.
At the story’s bittersweet end, the author makes it clear that this sixth case for the elderly detectives is also their last. To which we say: This mustn’t happen. Given their age and longevity, it’s inevitable that Bryant, May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit can’t go on forever, but there have to be many untold stories from earlier that could be written up.
Fowler has done this once already with “Seventy-Seven Clocks,” set in 1973, so why not again? We just can’t bear to see this series end.
Second Violin, by John Lawton, $24. Frederick Troy, the son of an Anglo-Russian aristocrat, has unpredictably chosen a career with Scotland Yard, where he has just been promoted to the Murder Squad, and his older brother, Rod, is a foreign correspondent stationed in Austria — not a good place to be in 1938, when the book opens.
After bearing witness to the violence against Jews known as Kristallnacht, Rod returns to London, where his brother has been assigned the unenviable task of rounding up enemy aliens of all stripes and sending them to a prison camp on the Isle of Man.
Ironically, it turns out that Rod, who though raised in England, was Austrian-born and never saw it necessary to become a British subject, is one of the men scheduled to be interned there. Much of the story is told from his point of view, and his account of life in the prison camp, where Jews coexisted with the occasional Nazi and most of the prisoners were law-abiding tailors, chefs and shopkeepers imprisoned for crimes they never committed, is compelling.
The actual mystery, which is only a small part of this complex, multilayered story, involves a serial killer who targets rabbis.
It provides a solid framework for the book, but what the reader will remember best is Lawton’s vivid portrayal of life in London during the Blitz. Although sixth in the series, the book is chronologically the first, and readers familiar with Troy’s subsequent adventures will enjoy seeing characters who become fixtures in later books make their first appearances here, particularly his Scotland Yard superior Walter Stilton and Stilton’s tempestuous daughter Kitty.
There are also many real-life characters of the time: Freud, Churchill, Chamberlain, all lending further authenticity to the story. It’s a series we just can’t get enough of and we’re thankful that the author shows no signs of letting it go.
Hold My Hand, by Serena Mackesy, $25. Looking for a way to escape a psychopathically abusive ex-husband, Bridget Sweeny leaves London with her young daughter Yasmin for a job as caretaker at a Cornish manor house, Rospetroc, whose absentee owner is operating it as a bed and breakfast. At first it seems ideal: After what she’s been through, Bridget doesn’t mind the isolation. The work is hard but not impossible, and Yasmin seems to be settling in nicely, although Bridget can’t figure out who her new best friend, Lily, could be.
But then things start getting seriously spooky. Lily is the ghost of a young street urchin who was evacuated from Portsmouth during World War II, only to be horribly mistreated by the snobbish family who took her in. She may be Yasmin’s friend, but she still has a score to settle with Rospetroc.
And Kieran, Bridget’s vengeful ex, is rapidly closing in on them. Suspenseful and atmospheric, the story is perhaps two parts Stephen King to one part Daphne du Maurier, adding up to a swift, pleasantly scary read.
Tom and Enid Schantz write regularly about new mystery releases.
