BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART

As if London didn’t provide enough live citizens to worry about, the Peculiar Crimes Unit (The Invisible Code, 2013, etc.) is presented with one at least briefly returned from the dead.

Romain Curtis may be only a teenager out for a quick canoodle with Shirone Estanza, but he knows what he saw in St. George’s Gardens, a city park with a few gravesites still awaiting their tenants. And what he saw is a reanimated corpse rising from the grave. He heard it speaking to him, too, before it plopped back down in the dirt. When the problem of the late Thomas Edward Wallace, a small-beer lawyer who hanged himself last week, comes to the attention of Arthur Bryant and John May, they seize it avidly—especially Mr. Bryant—as one more case that can justify their continued funding under their new patron, bureaucratic-jargon–spouting City of London Public Liaison Officer Orion Banks. As they zero in on Krishna Jhadav, the client who pulled his brokerage account from Wallace’s practice shortly before the lawyer’s death, another case comes equally unbidden: the disappearance from the Tower of London of the seven ravens tied by legend to England’s continued safety. Dealing with reanimation, grave-robbing, ravens and the dark arts naturally brings the PCU up against several experts even more peculiar than they are, most notably the sinister academic/necromancer Peregrine Wosthold Merry. Their consultations are the comically learned high points in the team’s 11th adventure.

Not to worry: Everything is wrapped up logically, if not exactly convincingly, in the end. Sleep well, Your Majesty.