Product Description
A controversial artist is found dead in her own art installation inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows - the only witness is a small boy who insists the murderer was a masked man on a horse. A television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors...Two seemingly impossible crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May is fighting to keep the unit from closure. Worse still, the case of the Leicester Square Vampire, an unsolved mystery from the past that changed both their lives, has returned to haunt them. With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets in a series of crimes each more puzzling than the last, the elderly detectives track their suspect to an exclusive private school and a deprived housing estate. But just when they need all the help they can get to uncover a new breed of criminal, the highwayman is hailed a national hero, and the public turns against them...Bryant & May are back on the case in an adventure that explores the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth, age and class, and the peculiar myths of old London.
From the Inside Flap
It is a crime tailor-made for the Met’s Peculiar Crimes Unit: a controversial contemporary artist murdered and displayed as part of her own outrageous installation. No suspects, no motive, no evidence – which means business as usual for the PCU’s decrepit and cantankerous detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May. But this time they have a witness – a twelve-year-old boy who swears the killer was a masked highwayman riding a black horse . . .
In the face of others’ disbelief, Bryant and May take the sighting seriously – and then ‘the Highwayman’ is spotted again, at the scene of his next outlandish murder. Whatever the killer’s real identity, he seems intent on ridding London of various minor celebrities while becoming one himself. As the tabloids begin to create ‘Highwayman Fever’, Bryant and May, together with the newest member of the team – May’s agoraphobic granddaughter, April – find themselves baffled by a case that seems to involve everything from vicious artistic rivalries and sleazy sex to feuding street gangs and the Knights Templar. To crack it, they need to use every orthodox – and unorthodox – means at their disposal, including myth, witchcraft and the psycho-geographic history of London’s ‘monsters’ past and present.
And if one unsolvable crime were not enough, it begins to look as though this case has disturbing links to a decades-old killing spree that nearly destroyed the partnership of Bryant and May once before . . . and might again.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
by Christopher Fowler
by Christopher Fowler
by Christopher Fowler
by Christopher Fowler
by Christopher Fowler
