Full Dark House

By Christopher Fowler
The adventures of Bryant & May, detectives with the Metropolitan Police's Peculiar Crimes Unit, sounds like it should be in the same kind of supernatural cop space occupied by Ben Aaronovitch, or, given that Arthur Bryant apparently dies in an explosion shortly before the start of the first book in the series, Randal and Hopkirk (deceased).
Alas it's not.
We have here a rather cleverly constructed novel set in two periods, the unit's first case in 1940, the surviving detective's investigations in... not entirely clear, but they have mobile phones and aren't surprised by them, do lets assume it's about 2003 when the book was published.
It is not clear quite how a pair of detectives might still be working in their eighties, though it is remarked upon. Perhaps there it's more explanation in later books.
The central characters are likable enough in a kind of repressed English manner. All jolly enough. So why didn't out really grab me?
Perhaps out was just first book (in that series anyway) not quite finding its voice, but there was a sense that the crimes involved weren't peculiar enough.
What we have instead is a story about detectives investigating a theatre where someone is murdering their way through the cast and crew of a new production, in that way that never really happens, but turns up a lot in fiction. We have a detective who has studied in the Elijah Bailey school of deduction, accusing everybody in sight until it ultimately turns out to be the character that he and you had no real reason to think existed, let alone was in the theatre all that time. Very much the sort of thing you expect in a book, even one that doesn't bill itself as peculiar.