Ten-Second Staircase - Tapa dura

First a controversial artist is found dead in her own art installation, inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows - and the only witness is a small boy who insists that the murderer was a masked man riding a stallion. Then a television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors. Clearly, these are the kind of impossible crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May is fighting to keep the unit from closure. Worse still, the case of the Leicester Square Vampire, an unsolved mystery from the past that changed both their lives, has returned to haunt them in the present. With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets in a series of crimes each more puzzling than the last, the elderly detectives track their suspect to an exclusive private school and a deprived housing estate. But just when they need all the help they can get to uncover a new breed of criminal, the highwayman begins to be hailed a national hero, and the public turns against them. Bryant and May, the nation's most extraordinary investigators are back on the case in a breathless adventure that explores the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth, age and class, and the peculiar myths of old London.

Christopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of twelve novels, including Roofworld, Spanky, Soho Black and the Bryant & May mysteries Full Dark House - which won the 2004 BFS August Derleth Award for Best Novel - and The Water Room - nominated for the Crime Writers' Association People's Choice Dagger Award and the 2005 August Derleth Award - and Seventy-Seven Clocks. He lives in London's King's Cross.