Ten Second Staircase (Peculiar Crimes Unit Series #4) » (Reprint)

Chrisopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of fifteen previous novels, including the award-winning Full Dark House, and four other Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, White Corridor, The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, and Ten Second Staircase. He lives in London.

It’s a crime tailor-made for the Peculiar Crimes Unit: a controversial artist is murdered and displayed as part of her own outrageous installation. No suspects, no motive, no evidence—but this time they do have an eyewitness. A twelve-year-old claims the killer was a cape-clad highwayman atop a black stallion. Whoever the killer really is, he seems intent on killing off enough minor celebrities to become one himself. As “Highwayman Fever” grips London, Bryant and May, along with the newest member of the Unit, May’s agoraphobic granddaughter, April, find themselves sorting out a case involving artistic rivalries, sleazy sex affairs, the Knights Templars, feuding street gangs, and a decades-old crime spree that split up their partnership once before—and threatens to end it again…with murder.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

Fowler is in exuberant form here. His story begins with a series of elaborate executions of second-rate celebrities, carried out, according to eyewitnesses, by a masked highwayman on horseback. Seizing on the mythic stature of this figure, with its links to Robin Hood and other folk legends, Bryant speculates that the vigilante is a flesh-and-blood murderer "rehabilitated in the public mind as a hero, a people's champion." The question is, which disenfranchised group has conjured him up and what's the beef with celebrities?