Mother Of Mercy, Is This The End of The Peculiar Crimes Unit?

Bryant & May On the Loose, the seventh book in the series, could be the last book Christopher Fowler ever writes about Scotland Yard's weirdest and most endearing fictional duo.

With the special police unit shut down, mostly because of budget cuts, Detective Arthur Bryant is feeling withdrawn and depressed while his partner, John May, is considering PI work. May is the more affable of the two, while the socially inept Bryant takes every opportunity to anger his bosses at the Yard. When a former team member stumbles on a beheaded corpse in London's King's Cross neighborhood, May uses the discovery to gain the Unit a brief new lease on life. He persuades the higher-ups that unsolved gang crimes in the area could threaten the economic benefit anticipated from the 2012 Olympics. Given one week to solve the case, without any official sanction or access to police resources, May pulls Bryant out of his doldrums and reassembles the unit. To May's dismay, his colleague is more interested in reports that a man wearing a stag's head has been seen in the area.

In last year's The Victoria Vanishes, my favorite in this underappreciated series, Bryant watches a famous pub disappear in the course of chasing a serial killer who preys on middle-age women in the city’s most popular watering holes. B&M discover a connection between the victims, but the most critical clues, it turns out, are embedded in the histories of the saloons (including the long-gone Victoria Cross, where Bryant swears he saw one of the victims just moments before her death).

Fowler has written a total of 15 novels, including the highly-lauded Full Dark House, and if anyone can keep these two grand geezers alive, it's him. Let's all keep our fingers crossed...