If I have any influence over your reading choices at all, I beg you: Please start reading Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May books. Arthur Bryant and John May are two detectives of indeterminate (but extremely elderly) age who head up London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU), and have been doing so from World War II to the present days in which the series takes place. The body has changed over the years, but the head has not, with the fairly straightforward May, by his own admission, playing the compliant, if not always willing, straight man to the eccentric, usually illogical but (almost) always correct Bryant.

The newly published STRANGE TIDE is the 13th of these; like its siblings, it is full of tidbits about London geography, culture and history, with much humor of the grim and subtle varieties, and constructed with a strong and puzzling mystery at its foundation. Best of all, you can read it without having picked up any of the books that have gone before and still enjoy it immensely.

"The mystery at hand is a traditional one --- Fowler gives a wink and a nod to Agatha Christie at a couple of points, and hilariously so --- but is wrapped in a timeless package with a contemporary ribbon."

There are actually two puzzles that run throughout these pages, though one seems to have been solved before the book even begins. More on that in a moment. The primary puzzle that drives the events of this story is the discovery of the body of a young woman who has been chained on the banks of the Thames River and left to drown. There is some question as to whether there has been a crime at all, other than suicide, given that there is only one set of footprints accompanying the body. Murder it is, though, and soon her death is linked to a series of others, one preceding hers, and more to follow. Events being what they are, the last in the sequence is laid directly at the feet of May himself, and there is circumstantial evidence galore to indicate that he may indeed be the doer.

The PCU has already been thrown into chaos by the apparent mental deterioration of Bryant, whose eccentric ways have devolved over the last few books into what appears to be full-blown dementia, with aimless wanderings, hallucinations that take him back in time, and seemingly irrelevant statements that comprise flights of illogic...actually, he’s been exhibiting the latter of those for some time now, given that he thinks best that way.

The problem --- secondary to Bryant’s quality of life, of course --- is that one and all agree that there simply cannot be a PCU without him. The acceleration of the decay of his intellect could not come at a worse time for the unit, or for May, his crime-fighting partner of several decades. It turns out that Bryant has the solution to his problems and May’s, as well as the series of murders the team is investigating, locked up in his subconscious. The burning question is whether he can get to them.

STRANGE TIDE may not be my favorite Bryant & May book, but it’s close. I was laughing before finishing the first page and cringing upon completion of the first chapter. The mystery at hand is a traditional one --- Fowler gives a wink and a nod to Agatha Christie at a couple of points, and hilariously so --- but is wrapped in a timeless package with a contemporary ribbon. The supporting cast --- from Raymond Land, the hapless and helpless unit chief, to the ever-present “Two Daves” and Crippen, the staff cat with the inconveniently weak stomach --- is sharply defined and memorable, even as they are eclipsed by the series’ two stars.

The third star, however, is the Thames River, which flows through the plot and, as revealed by Fowler’s narrative, is so interesting that one must resist the temptation to pack passport, raincoat and umbrella, and travel to London to walk the banks for oneself. These elements and others make STRANGE TIDE, and the series as a whole, a treasure for those who love reading of any genre.