Sixth in the Bryant and May series and almost as good as the Water Room, my favourite, so I would rate this 4.5 stars.

It commences shortly after The White Corridor. The Peculiar Crimes Unit throws a wake for their late pathologist, whose death formed one of the threads in the previous book. On the way home, Arthur Bryant, the most eccentric of the unit's two elderly detectives, notices a woman going into a pub. When she is later found dead in the street, it turns out that she was murdered, but Bryant starts to doubt his memory when there is no pub at the place where he saw her - it was demo!ished many years ago. The resolution is one of the series' usual rather unlikely ones, yet the enjoyment in this book is how the various characters interact, the dry humour, and the setting of London, which as in most of the series, is a character in itself. The ending is poignant and I think ties in with something I read, that Fowler originally planned the series as six books, but he was obviously persuaded to write more, and I look forward to reading the rest. ( )

Not at all what I expected from ‘Peculiar Crimes’.

I originally picked this up in an Audible sale on the basis of a lot of rave reviews of both writer and narrator. It is not the first in the series though the ending could leave you thinking that it is the last.

I found the story hard to get into with quite a lengthy opening section devoted to a group of colleagues at a wake, all of whom seemed to be fed up with life and each other. Arthur Bryant, giving the ‘eulogy’, had a voice and manner which I found unappealing. This section didn’t seem to be leading anywhere and, wondering when the story was going to start, I was tempted it bin it and listen to something else. It did grow on me though and I stuck with it to the end.

The narration is good with well-defined voices given to all the characters.

The plot is very convoluted and hard to keep track of at times.

I might have enjoyed it more if I had read earlier books in the series. ( )

It's a puzzle for the Peculiar Crimes Unit when Bryant is a witness to a crime at a pub which does not exist. The unit is being re-organized and there is general disarray.
It's a fairly good mystery with some humorous elements and an incredible array of British Pubs. ( )

Sigh. After the intimacy of [Three Junes], this mystery was an annoying hack. It does not aspire to great literature, of course, but the contrast was unpleasant. ( )

This is astonishingly good. Fowler is erudite, his writing sublime, his knowledge of arcane trivia of London behind comparison, his characters lovable and his books funny. ( )