Bryant & May Off The Rails (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
This book was fun to read and was a perfect palate cleanser after my last heavy literary meal. I loved the author's bubbly style:"Arthur Bryant: Have you met him before? If not, imagine a tortoise minus its shell, thrust upright and stuffed into a dreadful suit. Give it glasses, false teeth and a hearing aid, and a wispy band of white hair arranged in a straggling tonsure. Fill its pockets with rubbish: old pennies and scribbled notes, boiled sweets and leaky pens, a glass model of a Ford Prefect filled with Isle of Wight sand, yards of string, a stuffed mouse, some dried peas. And fill its head with a mad scramble of ideas: the height of the steeple at St. Clement Danes, the tide table of the Thames, the dimensions of Waterloo Station and the MOs of murderers. On top of this, add the enquiring wonder of a ten-year-old boy. Now you have some measure of the man."Can't wait to spend more time with the Peculiar Crimes Unit. (Fans of The Rivers of London series will probably like this one too.) I've always ignored the mystery genre, for no real reason except that it usually doesn't come up when looking for the next hard sci-fi, literary postmodernist, or military history book that I usually prefer. However, I decided to broaded my horizons lately, and I'm glad I chose a Bryant & May book to kickstart that. I found the book clever, briskly paced, and just barely on the far side of "realistic." It also contained a few nice diversions into the history of the London Underground, which were highly enjoyable. This was the first book in this series that I've read, so many of the references to other cases and storylines went over my head. However, instead of distracting from the book's plot, they helped cement this particular episode as part of a larger mythology, which made me excited to track down other books in the series.
What do You think about Bryant & May Off The Rails (2010)?
Another fun romp with Bryant and May. With Underground lore all woven in. Great stuff.
—Spankeh
It's got london underground in it, how could I possibly not love it...
—cuckoo
Good stuff, if true, about the London Underground.
—enders
