Jim's Books

Ten Second Staircase

Christopher Fowler

Ten Second Staircase
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ISBN: 9780553817201

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.

Reviewed on 4th December 2015

I was very tempted to give up on the Bryant and May series after reading book three and finding it dull and hard to follow. It was only because I already had more books in the series already waiting on my shelf that I decided to pick up Ten Second Staircase and give it a go. I'm very glad I did.

Set in the present day, our at least relatively close to it, this fourth book tells of an investigation by the Peculiar Crimes Unit into a mysterious death of a controversial public figure. The plot is much more similar I structure and detail to a typical detective story, and I finally got my head around who all the characters are and how the world fits together.

It's a really good mystery that fits the style of the series without distracting from the story, and serves really well to establish the world that these books are set in. I almost wish that this had been the first book I read as it is much more approachable and really gripped me all the way through and has made me much more excited about continuing reading about these characters.

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