Seventy-Seven Clocks, White Corridor, and Ten Second Staircase, by Christopher Fowler

Seventy-Seven Clocks:

I like the idea of a Peculiar Crimes unit. I like the flashback to when the elderly detectives were less old and crazy. I didn't realize until I read the others that the books were pretty obsessed with fear of death and dying and the unit being shut down, but this one is a flashback, so it manages to just be a whodunnit. I was a little startled at the high death count, but it's as good a mystery as I've read in the last few years.

White Corridor:

I liked the locked-roomed mystery aspect of this a lot. It fell into that odd category of mysteries I seem to find a lot; books with crimes, but not actual mystery. Someone is killed and then everyone talks about the consequences and figures out why and there's no one to arrest, the end. I run into this a lot, especially with historical mysteries.

Ten Second Staircase:

This book is really, really bleak. Every chapter is about how the detectives are too old to do the job anymore, or how their unit is about to shut down. That aside, I can't really talk about what drove me craziest without spoiling the end, so spoilers follow:

The whodunnit aspect is ridiculous; I figured out within the first few chapters that it had to be multiple suspects, for heaven's sake. The detectives' refusal to notice that drove me crazy. When the dying woman says on the phone, "Oh my god, it's not a man--" and then dies, the "--it's A BUNCH of men!" is just duh. Spending chapters and chapters where the detectives think she meant a woman is painful.

Second, the moral of the book turns out to be that kids are awful, teenagers have no souls, this generation is ruined, and we're all going to hell because teenagers suck. It's HARD for me to read a book where the villains turn out to be high schoolers, because I work with Local Teens in the city. They are mostly great kids. When I tell people I work in the Bronx I inevitably get either a horrified, "Why?" or a terrified, "Well, god bless you." But the thing is, those kids AREN'T SCARY. Kids aren't really stabbing people for no reason or stealing and raping or any of that shit. At least, 99% of them aren't. Bah.

Grade: Seventy-seven clocks: B
White Corridor: B
Ten Second Staircase: D

Originally published 2009