Bryant & May: Hall of Mirrors: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
<b>London, 1969. With the Swinging Sixties under way, Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May find themselves caught in the middle of a good, old-fashioned manor house murder mystery.</b><br /><br /> Hard to believe, but even positively ancient sleuths like Bryant and May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit were young once . . . or at least younger. Flashback to London 1969: mods and dolly birds, sunburst minidresses—but how long would the party last?<br /><br /> After accidentally sinking a barge painted like the Yellow Submarine, Bryant and May are relegated to babysitting one Monty Hatton-Jones, the star prosecution witness in the trial of a disreputable developer whose prefabs are prone to collapse. The job for the demoted detectives? Keep the whistle-blower safe for one weekend.<br /><br /> The task proves unexpectedly challenging when their unruly charge insists on attending a party at the vast estate Tavistock Hall. With falling stone gryphons, secret passageways, rumors of a mythical beast, and an all-too-real dismembered corpse, the bedeviled policemen soon find themselves with “a proper country house murder” on their hands.<br /><br /> Trapped for the weekend, Bryant and May must sort the victims from the suspects, including a hippie heir, a blond nightclub singer, and Monty himself—and <i>nobody</i> is quite who he or she seems to be.<br /><br /><b>Praise for</b> <i><b>Bryant & May: Hall of Mirrors</b></i><br /><br />“Arthur Bryant has written his memoirs—and a jolly good yarn they make, too. . . . As always in this series, this one’s a lark.”<b>—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /><br /> “[<i>Hall of Mirrors</i> is] a largely comic escapade whose tone evokes both the biting wit of Evelyn Waugh and the slapsticker shenanigans of P.G. Woodhouse.”<b>—<i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br /><br /> “More fully fleshed-out suspects, clues, red herrings, twists, and honest mystery and detection than in the last three whodunits you read.”<b>—<i>Kirkus Reviews</i></b><br /><br /> “The narrative [veers] between laugh-out-loud funny to macabre. . . . Eccentric and consistently entertaining.”<b>—<i>Booklist</i></b><br /><br /> “Fowler evokes the period as neatly as he crafts the plot.”<b>—<i>Publishers Weekly</i></b><br /><br /> “Wonderful.”<b>—<i>Deadly Pleasures</i></b><br /><br /> “So Agatha Christie (intentionally). And as in a Christie, nothing is quite what it seems as one murder follows another. Love the butler.”<b>—<i>Poisoned Pen</i> <i>Newsletter</i></b>