cover:
An oasis in the heart of Kentish Town, Balaklava Street is ripe for gentrification, but then the body of an elderly woman is found at No. 5. Her demise seems to have been peaceful but for the fact that her throat is full of river water...

For the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit, led by London's longest-serving detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May, this curious death marks the beginning of a distinctly sinister investigation. And the new owner of No. % is understandably unsettled by the damp in the basement of her home, some particularly resilient spiders and the ghostly sound of rushing water.

Unearthing hitherto undiscovered secrets, the two octogenarian policemen learn that, in a London filled with the rich, the poor and the dispossessed, there's still something a desperate individual is willing to kill for. And kill again to protect.

Armed only with their wits, their own idiosyncratic practices and a plentiful supply of boiled sweets, Bryant and May come face to face with madness, greed and revenge in a wickedly sinuous mystery that goes to the heart of every home.

Not as good as I thought it would be. I liked the idea of these old detectives working on difficult crimes that no one else wanted, but in the end I found Bryant so irritating to read about that it took away from my enjoyment of the story. London is a great character in the book - all those ancient waterways under the modern city - but, oh, how dreary it all sounds.

Mooched by newcaribou.