Arthur Penhaligon is not supposed to be a hero. He is, in fact, supposed to die an early death. But then his life is saved by a key shaped like the minute hand of a clock.

When he moves to Dublin, Arthur has premonitions about a great evil that threatens the world and soon finds himself up against the trickster Viking god Loki and the World Serpent.

It was late in 1973. As strikes and blackouts ravaged the country during the Heath government's 'Winter of Discontent', members of an aristocratic family were being disposed of in various grotesque ways - by reptile, by bomb, by barber. As the hours of daylight diminish towards Christmas, Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crime Unit know that time is the key - and time is running out for the family and the police. Their investigations...

Arthur Dent's accidental association with that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has not been entirely without incident. Arthur has traveled the length, breadth, and depth of known, and unknown, space. He has stumbled forward and backward through time. He has been blown up, reassembled, cruelly imprisoned, horribly released, and colorfully insulted more than is strictly necessary. And of course Arthur Dent has comprehensively...

"Why does [the] rainy, cold, gray city [of London] capture so many imaginations? Could its very unreliability hold the key to its longevity? The detectives are joined by their boss Raymond Land and some of their most disreputable friends, each an argumentative and unreliable expert in their own dodgy field. Each character gives us a short tour of odd buildings, odder characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing routes, dubious gossip, illicit...

"The brilliant duo of Arthur Bryant and John May uncover a nefarious plot behind the seemingly innocuous death of an old lady--and when the case leads them to the London Bridge, it all comes down on the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Ninety-one-year-old Alice Hoffman died alone in her top-floor flat. Social services say she slipped through the cracks in a failing system. But detectives Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit have their suspicions....

"London, 1969. With the Swinging Sixties under way, Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May find themselves caught in the middle of a good, old-fashioned manor house murder mystery. The critics are mad for Christopher Fowler, his irascible creations Bryant and May, and the Peculiar author's gift for writing classic mysteries with delightfully uncommon twists. Entertainment Weekly calls Fowler "deadpan, sly, and always unexpectedly inventive," while...

A teenager sees a dead man rise from his grave--and moments later is killed in a sudden hit-and-run accident. Seven ravens housed in the impenetrable fortress that is the Tower of London vanish without a trace--and legend has it that when the ravens leave, the city will fall. Bryant and May must figure out how these two inexplicable, seemingly unrelated mysteries fit together as they begin an investigation that finds them confronting a group of latter-day...