Bryant & May - London Bridge is Falling Down – Fowler Christopher (2022)

When ninety-one-year-old Amelia Hoffman dies in her top-floor flat on a busy London road, her death is treated as an example of what has gone wrong with modern society: she slipped through the cracks of a failing system. Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit have their doubts. Mrs Hoffman was once a government security expert, although no one can quite remember her. When a connection emerges between the old woman and a diplomat trying to flee the country, it appears that an impossible murder has been committed. Bryant becomes convinced that other forgotten women with hidden talents are also in danger, and oddly, they all own models of London Bridge. With help from some of their more certifiable informants, the detectives follow bizarre clues through forgotten alleyways to the city’s oldest bridge in pursuit of a desperate killer. Just when the case seems solved, they discover that Mrs Hoffman was more intelligent than anyone imagined and that a much larger game is under way, with terrible consequences. In this twentieth-anniversary case, Bryant and May face the most lunatic investigation yet, bringing death and rebirth to London’s most peculiar crimes unit.