An artist is found dead in her own art installation. A television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors. Two crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance

The unthinkable has happened at London's Peculiar Crimes Unit. In the bitter depths of winter, a key member of staff has been found murdered, and everyone who works there is suddenly a suspect.

Christopher Fowler's memoir captures life in suburban London as it has rarely been seen: through the eyes of a lonely boy who spends his days between the library and the cinema, devouring novels, comics, cereal packets - anything that might reveal a story.

In this crime novel, the team of Inspectors Bryant and May investigate a series of macabre murders against the eerie urban chaos of London during the Blitz.

Pooling their information to investigate hitherto undiscovered secrets of the city, Bryant and May make some sinister connections and realize 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.

It was late in 1973. As strikes and blackouts ravaged the country during Edward Heath's 'Winter of Discontent', sundry members of a wealthy, aristocratic family were being disposed of in a variety of grotesque ways. Bryant and May, the irascible detectives, know that time is the key. Their investigations lead them into a hidden world.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit is to be disbanded. For octogenarian detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, it seems retirement is now the only option. But then a headless body is found in a freezer. With limited resources and very little time, the PCU are back in business.

Arthur Bryant, John May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit are on the trail of an enigma: a young man called Mr Fox. But his identity is false, his links to society are invisible and his home yields no clues. All they know is that somehow he escaped from a locked room and murdered one of their best and brightest.

The defenestration of a ruthless theatre impresario's young son was definitely not the best way to end the play's first night party. And the crime scene itself was most unusual: a locked bedroom, with no sign of forced entry, no prints or traces of blood, just a sinister, life-size puppet of Mr Punch lying on the floor.

Two small children are playing a game called 'Witch-Hunter'. They place a curse on a young woman taking lunch in a church courtyard and wait for her to die. An hour later the woman is indeed found dead inside St Bride's Church - a building that no-one else has entered.