I haven't read a book like this in many years, and it was interesting to come back to this sort of thing.

The New York Times blurb on the cover calls the author "a master of classical form." By which I guess they mean, this is a British mystery with a crime that is a totally bizarre puzzle: an old woman is found dead, fully dressed, sitting in a chair in her perfectly dry basement - and she died of drowning.

If you were to buy me too many fancy drinks and persuade me to talk about what I write - which I won't do otherwise because I think it is a boring and pretentious thing to do - I would explain that the amateur detective novel is basically a subgenre of fantasy. In reality, murders don't happen in interesting ways, rarely for interesting reasons, and are never solved by amateurs. And if a zookeeper/little old lady/etc did somehow solve a murder once, there is no way there are going to be repeated murders at the same zoo/in the same small British town/etc, or that she is going to solve them again.

But after years of reading various more modern incarnations of the murder mystery genre, I had forgotten how true this is of the classical mystery. Even though the characters in this book are nominally police - well, the fact that they run the Peculiar Crimes Unit should be a warning that there is no way any of this would happen in real life. But it doesn't matter, it's a wonderful fantasy.

I was attracted to the book because it's largely about the rivers in London that have been buried underground. There's all sorts of history in it, history of the kind I like: the details of everyday life, the layers of time that are found in an old city, and I loved those parts of it. The characters are real enough that most of their motives make sense, but not so real that you feel too bad for them. Which is awfully relaxing compared to the realistic, modern, nitty-gritty violent sort of mystery that people seem to have more respect for nowadays.

My only quibble with this book was that the solution was half disappointing. The solution to the mystery of who one character was and how he set the business in motion, was totally cool. But the solution to who did the murder and how it was done was more disappointing, the identity of the murderer in particular. It a character you never would have expected because s/he seemed basically unconnected to everything that was going on. This always kind of annoys me, I think because it seems like such a trick, and also because it requires so much explanation at the end. But really, a book like this, the whole thing is a trick, so maybe it isn't fair to complain.

Anyway, in the end, the book was 99% a pleasure to read, I am looking forward to reading more of this series. One warning: don't read this one first like I did. It contains what seems like a pretty critical spoiler for a previous book in the series.