![]() ![]() So Far and Good, the latest adventure, finds Cecil serving seven-plus years in prison for homicide, arguably a necessary one. From the outset, 1992's Shamus Award-winning The Woman Who Married a Bear, the books have combined grittiness, social issues and introspection with whimsy and slapstick, as the hapless investigator moves from crisis to crisis, both business and personal. So Far and Goodįor the better part of 30 years, I have counted myself as a major fan of John Straley's sporadic series featuring Alaska-based PI Cecil Younger. Next year, we will see Bryant and May's Peculiar London, a companion travelogue of sorts in which fan-favorite characters will hilariously dish on their home city while ambling about its streets, and there will be no dead bodies to be found anywhere. Lovers of this series need not despair (well, not yet). The narrative neatly straddles the blurry line separating espionage fiction from straight-up suspense, and adds for good measure a mean streets of London travelogue and more than a little laugh-out-loud but still dry British humor. Hoffman had something of a chequered (the English spelling must be used here) past, as it turns out, and before long the case develops into a full-blown conspiracy investigation. So in hopes of postponing the inevitable, Bryant goes in search of a case and turns one up: Amelia Hoffman, age 91, whose death does not entirely fall into the catch-all of natural causes. ![]() Both protagonists, cranky Arthur Bryant and the urbane and charming John May, are getting rather long in the tooth (in Bryant's case, long in the dentures), and cases don't present quite as frequently as they once did. With each passing book, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, which solves murders that stump other branches of law enforcement, finds itself more critically threatened with closure. Spoiler alert: London Bridge Is Falling Down marks the final installment of Christopher Fowler's beloved Bryant and May series. Bryant & May: London Bridge Is Falling Down Still, her Russian adversaries are nothing if not determined, and there are at least a couple of times when readers will wonder if this is the book where Jane's story comes to an untimely end. Suddenly, she finds herself on the run, and the safest places for her are the forests and fields of Maine's Hundred-Mile Wilderness, one of the ancestral Seneca territories where she holds the home-court advantage over lifetime city dwellers. The first part of the task is fairly straightforward, utilizing the obfuscation skills Jane has honed over the years, but it all starts to go sideways when the ex-boyfriend enlists the help of the Russian mob, a group with an agenda of its own in locating Jane: extracting information from her about past clients who ran afoul of the mob. This time out, she assists a young woman who testified against her boyfriend in a murder trial only to see him acquitted and bent on revenge. ![]() The term guide does not entirely describe Whitefield's job she serves as a one-woman witness protection program, spiriting people out of life-threatening situations and into new and safer existences. ![]() Edgar Award-winning author Thomas Perry returns with The Left-Handed Twin, his ninth novel featuring guide Jane Whitefield, a member of the Wolf clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians. ![]()
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