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A review by lowlife121
Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler
4.0
By now, it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to enjoy any Bryant and May book, even an absurd one as this.
Seventy-Seven Clocks starts out with a framing device, where Bryant recollects to his biographer one of their many cases, this one set in the 70s during London's blackout. The setting is perfect - a distinguished English family is being terrorized by unknown assailants and Bryant and May are the only ones (of course) to solve the mystery.
The outcome of this novel may hinge on how much you can suspend disbelief. Even Fowler mentions the absurdity of this novel in another B&M book by saying that Bryant embellished a lot of elements of the story. But I loved it. The ties to Victorian and Industrial London hit the right buttons for me and the book really felt like a good balance between the supernatural and the logical (think Indiana Jones).
It's a pretty taught, suspenseful story and you'll grow to hate most of the Whitstables during the course of the novel. Which endears you more and more to Bryant and his quirky ways of dealing with murders.
I think Seventy-Seven Clocks is considered to be one of the worst B&M mysteries, but I loved it simply because it's such a peculiarity of the series (see what I did there?) and it's nice to see the detectives not talking about being old all the time (although it still happens quite a bit in this story).
Seventy-Seven Clocks starts out with a framing device, where Bryant recollects to his biographer one of their many cases, this one set in the 70s during London's blackout. The setting is perfect - a distinguished English family is being terrorized by unknown assailants and Bryant and May are the only ones (of course) to solve the mystery.
The outcome of this novel may hinge on how much you can suspend disbelief. Even Fowler mentions the absurdity of this novel in another B&M book by saying that Bryant embellished a lot of elements of the story. But I loved it. The ties to Victorian and Industrial London hit the right buttons for me and the book really felt like a good balance between the supernatural and the logical (think Indiana Jones).
It's a pretty taught, suspenseful story and you'll grow to hate most of the Whitstables during the course of the novel. Which endears you more and more to Bryant and his quirky ways of dealing with murders.
I think Seventy-Seven Clocks is considered to be one of the worst B&M mysteries, but I loved it simply because it's such a peculiarity of the series (see what I did there?) and it's nice to see the detectives not talking about being old all the time (although it still happens quite a bit in this story).