England's Finest

By: Christopher Fowler

Narrated by: Tim Goodman

Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

The Peculiar Crimes Unit has solved many extraordinary cases over the years, but some were hushed up and hidden away. Until now.

Arthur Bryant remembers these lost cases as if they were yesterday. Here, then, is the truth about the Covent Garden opera diva and the 17th reindeer, the body that falls from the Tate Gallery, the ordinary London street corner where strange accidents keep occurring, the consul’s son discovered buried in the unit’s basement, the corpse pulled from a swamp of Chinese dinners, a Hallowe’en crime in the Post Office Tower and the impossible death that’s the fault of a forgotten London legend.

Expect misunderstood clues, lost evidence, arguments about Dickens, churches, pubs and disorderly conduct from the investigative officers they laughingly call ‘England’s Finest’!

©2019 Christopher Fowler (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

I can't get enough of BRYANT & MAY.

THE BRYANT & MAY SERIES ARE DELIGHTFUL. The kind of read you can't put down. Tim Goodman is a good part of the series as well.
I enjoy listening to them again and again. This enables me to catch things I missed the first time around.
Mr. Fowler please keep writing BRYANT & MAY.

Six stars

As good as Christopher Fowler is (and he is!),
I would give an extra star to narrator Tim Goodman if I could. Thanks

Over to soon!

I have listened to all of this series and enjoyed each one of them. I wish they could just continue on. When they end I feel like I’m leaving amazing friends. Excellent narration, characters and stories. Always leaves me wanting more.

A singularly poor outlier in an otherwise excellent series.

I’m shocked that I could be so disappointed in this book because it’s in a series that I otherwise love.

The vast majority of the Bryant and May series are some of my favorite books that I suggest at every opportunity... and still will. This is an awful departure from the rest and is difficult to even get through. I had to re-start it twice after being well into it because it was so easy to loose interest. That’s not something I’ve experienced with most of the others. The narrator, Tim Goodman, is excellent as usual and seems to do the best he can with little to work with.

After listened to this nearly three times (because I thought I owed that to the strength of the series), I can’t remember anything that happened. Meanwhile, I was so grabbed by the earlier works that I can still picture my imagined scenes quite vividly as Mr. Fowler and Mr. Goodman combined to bring the stories with heart to life.

Basically, this should have been titled “BRYANT & MAY; TABLE SCRAPS.” It’s a bunch of uninteresting short stories that have no soul. They more-or-less come from out of nowhere and lead to nowhere. I don’t know if Christopher Fowler passed away but it almost feels like he’s done and the publisher was given a bunch of scraps that were found lying on the cutting room floor that they figured they could bleed one more purchase out of what is probably a pretty loyal audience. I certainly hope that’s not the case and Mr. Fowler is alive and well and working on a book with heart or at the very least enjoying retirement... but, if this is the new normal I’ll accept that I enjoyed a great run until now and retire this series myself.