NY: Soho Press, 2022.
Lovesey has produced several series of police-procedural-type detective yarns over the years, and this is the 21st in the adventures of Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Avon & Somerset Police, head of the CID in Bath. He’s getting older now and his nemesis, ACC Georgina Dalby is making serious noises about forcing him out to pasture, but the worried Diamond is hanging on with all twenty finger- and toenails and remains as crusty as ever.
NY: Soho Press, 2020.
Forty years ago, the author began this police-procedural mystery series featuring Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of Bath, and I honestly had my doubts about it. Diamond was blustery, grossly overweight, ego-ridden, verbally abusive to his subordinates, and in the first book he even got sacked and had to do private security work for a department store for awhile. But that was nineteen books ago and Diamond (and Lovesey) have long since gotten their act together. The series has been pretty good for some time now, though it’s not really up to award-winning level, and Lovesey sometimes seems to be mailing it in.
NY: SohoPress, 2017.
This series about Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath CID has been generally pretty good. The first couple of volumes were problematic, frankly, but then the author got a handle on his characters and now he’s up to adventure no. 17. Diamond runs into oddball situations in nearly every book, and this one is no different.
NY: Soho Press, 2016.
When this series started, back in the early ’90s, I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, head of Bath CID, in the West Country, was an abrasive and overweight bully. In fact, his high-handedness got him sacked and he spent the second book working security for a London department store. But Lovesey got him under control and Diamond settled down to a continuing and successful police career chronicled in writing and plots of generally high quality.
Continue reading “Lovesey, Peter. Another One Goes Tonight.”
NY: Soho Press, 2014.
This fourteenth episode in the investigative adventures of Superintendent Peter Diamond, head of the Bath CID, is partly pretty good and partly not so good, but it certainly starts with a bang — literally.
NY: Soho Press, 2013.
This twelfth book about Detective Superintendent of Bath CID is one of the more successful ones in the latter part of the series. (Diamond wasn’t a very sympathetic character in the first couple, but he got better.) The topical theme this time is classical chamber music, a very attenuated world which Lovesey obviously knows a good deal about. (He’s big on theater, too.)
NY: Soho Press, 2012.
“Hero to zero. Cop to corpse.” That’s how it starts. One minute PC Tasker of the Bath police is on night patrol, the next minute he’s lying on the pavement with a sniper’s bullet through his head. Cop-killing is always a bad thing and other cops won’t let up until they’ve caught the shooter. In this case, Tasker is the third dead uniformed constable in a couple of months, all in different towns in the area.
NY: Soho Press, 2009.
The author lives (or used to) in the Roman-founded spa city of Bath, which is mostly why his Detective Superintendent Diamond series is set there, and it makes a nice change from London and Yorkshire.
NY: Soho Press, 2007.
It’s been three years since the wife of Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond was murdered in Bath’s Victoria Park, and he thought he had come to grips with his loss, but being called out to view the body of another woman in the same park early one morning is very unsettling. This one is hanging by the neck from a piece of playground equipment, but what was at first assumed to be a suicide quickly proves (of course) to be murder.
NY: Soho Press, 2003.
It’s been a year since Superintendent Peter Diamond’s wife was murdered in a public park in Bath, and he’s finally beginning to come to terms with his loss, though the killer’s trial and then the appeals aren’t helping much. But this eighth book in the series actually begins with the strangling of a sunbather at a crowded beach down in Sussex, and that’s not his patch at all.
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