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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Well-written mystery
By K. Huff
The Victoria Vanishes is the sixth installment in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series featuring Bryant and May, two detectives who have strange methods of solving strange crimes. One evening, in front of the Victoria Cross pub, Bryant sees a woman murdered. Later, when he goes to investigate, he finds that the pub doesn’t exist. One murder turns into assorted as a killer is tracked down.
7 of 7 persons found the following review helpful.
“I’m far too old to commence obeying the rules now.”
By E. Bukowsky
In Christopher Fowler’s “The Victoria Vanishes,” the London-based Peculiar Crimes Unit investigates the case of a mysterious killer who targets women, seemingly at random, in English pubs. Arthur Bryant and John May, who are senior detectives and long-time partners, for some years have applied their esoteric knowledge, distinctive skills, and willingness to skirt the law to solve strange and confounding crimes. Both men are past retirement age and it shows. May, who is the more grounded of the two, is ailing and scheduled for surgery; Arthur’s memory, vision, and hearing are all gradually deteriorating and he is giving careful consideration to retirement.
3 of 3 humans found the following review helpful.
This is not a work to be skimmed on the bus, but rather to be read in the quiet of solitude
By A
The Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) mystery series by Christopher Fowler is one of a kind. Unapologetically British, one finds constituents of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, James Bond, “The Avengers” and “Danger Mouse” circulating all around the books, yet the conception is delightfully unique. The PCU is a division of the London Metropolitan Police Department, which has been in existence for over 60 years. Arthur Bryant and John May, it is stalwart, eccentric detectives, have been at the de facto helm for more or less the entire time, riding herd over a group of square but interesting pegs who can’t fit in anyplace else.
In THE VICTORIA VANISHES, middle-aged women are turning up dead in London pubs. The manner of their deaths — the administration of a painless, exceedingly quick-acting poison — is puzzling as well. What is confounding is that Bryant appears to have been the last person to see one of the victims alive, outside of a pub that had been demolished some 80 years previously. He is at a loss. Already coming to doubt the veracity of his observational faculties, he is seriously contemplating retirement. As with so galore of their other investigations, the sheer volume of Bryant and May’s case history, and Bryant’s encyclopedic if arcane body of cognition — hampered only by his sporadic though temporary memory lapses — at last win the day.
There is a bit of logic to this, given that, in their world, Bryant and May have been investigating cases for over six decades in one location. Elements of past and present cases dovetail, cross over, dip and swirl, and fall back on themselves. But in this book, when the identity of the murderer is revealed and the cad is apprehended, Bryant is not done. There are galore unanswered questions that deal not so much with the murderer’s motivation — that is all too clear — but with what, or who, wound him up and pointed him toward these queer victims. And what when it comes to that vanishing pub?
THE VICTORIA VANISHES is one of those rare books in which the real excitement begins after the murderer is brought to justice. And talk with regards to multiple endings! Fans of the series will be screaming, jumping up and down, unable to believe what they are reading by the time they reach the conclusion. I had to read the ending a couple of times before it sunk in that Fowler without doubt was in truth carrying out an act that had been hinted at since the beginning of the series. Or is he? That is but one of the galore attractions of these novels, which are as delightfully and insidiously addicting as a serotonin supplement.
Fowler makes demands on the reader: the plots are complex, the characters are multi-faceted, and the humor is fast, furious and subtle. This is not a work to be skimmed on the bus, but rather to be read in the quiet of solitude so that each word, sentence and nuance may be to the full or entire extent cherished alone and within context.
— Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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