I have yet to meet anyone who, after reading one of Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May mysteries for the first time, did not immediately seek out the rest and devour them. The series started strong with the award-winning FULL DARK HOUSE, and has exceeded the promise of that opening volume ever since. Fowler consistently provides a puzzling and unique mystery balanced by wonderfully sharp characterization, buttressed by a host of cultural, historical and geographical factoids about Great Britain. If you are not an Anglophile before reading a Bryant & May novel, you will be within the first few pages of one. Furthermore, there is always much to love for fans of the mystery genre and all of its subparts, from traditional to contemporary to police procedural.

Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May have been a part of the long-existing (beginning at a vague point near or following the end of World War II) and always-endangered Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU). The danger to the unit has been from within the London Police Department, as the PCU has been a burr under the saddle of every supervisor tasked with riding herd over it. The main reason for this has been the partnership of Bryant and May, who throughout (most of) the series have been presented in their brilliant advancing years, with Bryant being extremely eccentric and May being the more grounded of the two. Fowler has occasionally given his readers a peek behind the veil into their past, and does so again in HALL OF MIRRORS.

"Longtime fans of the series will rejoice once again.... HALL OF MIRRORS serves as an excellent introduction to what you’ve been missing for the last 15 years or so but can now enjoy to the fullest."

For the most part, the novel takes place in 1969, with a pair of vignettes set in the present that bookend the story to great effect. Here we find Bryant and May in their 20s and struggling to keep the PCU from being disbanded. They are relegated to babysitting a very difficult witness in an upcoming bribery trial. Monty Hatton-Jones insists on attending a gathering at Tavistock Hall, an estate outside of London on the weekend before the trial. The rural setting provides a fish-out-of-water experience for Bryant and May, who are more geared toward the metropolitan setting of greater London. Tavistock Hall is a shadow of its former glory. The meeting concerns the sale of the hall by the owner and her adult son --- a Baby Huey type who has ensconced a caravan of hippies on the premises --- to a wealthy American businessman who arrives with his wife and rumored mistress in tow.

Fowler is in no particular hurry to set the story pieces up on the board, and spends a good part of the novel’s first half doing just that while keeping readers wondrously entertained, as he reveals the first historical hints of the personality traits of his primary characters. The mayhem kicks in soon enough, as the numbers of those assembled --- which include a strange minister, an outrageous decorator and a mystery author --- begin to alarmingly decrease. Monty is also a target, subject to so many violent near-misses that he appears ready to suffer the same fate as Monty Python’s Black Knight. There is a steely-eyed method to all of this madness, and Bryant and May eventually sort it all out, even as Tavistock Hall is cut off by unforeseen war games and several acts of sabotage that threaten to keep the duo from completing their original mission of safely getting Monty to trial.

Fowler is nothing if not subtle, and entertainingly so. Each chapter is carefully and lovingly named after the title of a song popular during the late 1960s. Collectively they form a supplemental soundtrack that those of a certain age (and many who are not) will appreciate long after they’ve finished the book. And if that’s not enough, Fowler drops the news that more is coming from the Bryant & May case files. Longtime fans of the series will rejoice once again. If the above intrigues you, then HALL OF MIRRORS serves as an excellent introduction to what you’ve been missing for the last 15 years or so but can now enjoy to the fullest.