Starred review from September 2, 2024
Lovesey (Showstopper) concludes his long-running series featuring Bath detective Peter Diamond with a bang, delivering an ingenious fair-play whodunit set in the small English village of Baskerville as the annual harvest festival approaches. While Diamond contemplates retirement, his former colleague, Julie Hargreaves, summons him to Baskerville to investigate a potential miscarriage of justice. Claudia Priest, heir to a local dairy farm, threw a party in which her male guests were tasked with finding a hidden garter. Claudia’s ex-boyfriend, art dealer Roger Miller, tracked the item down inside a grain silo, but when he reached for it, the surface of the grain collapsed, and he was sucked under and suffocated. Though Claudia insisted the garter was placed there by somebody else, she was convicted of manslaughter—but Julie’s instincts tell her the killer is still at large. Intrigued, Diamond begins interviewing Julie and Claudia’s neighbors, leading him to try out a variety of identities before tracking the culprit to the annual festival. Lovesey derives genuine emotion from Diamond’s potential retirement, and his golden age–style plotting is as tight as ever. This sends the series out on a high note. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider Literary.
November 1, 2024
Break out the Double Diamond pale ale to celebrate the twenty-second title featuring one of fiction's best detectives, Peter Diamond, chief superintendent in Bath, the key creation of British master Peter Lovesey. He's tubby, surly, and hilarious in a wistful, oblique way. But when it comes to police work, he's strictly business. Good thing, as he visits a farm-turned-party site for a collection of over-monied city types, one of whom dies horribly during a "get the garter" game. He didn't know that a vat of grain can't be walked on without sinking and suffocating, but his killer did. Poking about, Diamond tries to be Columbo, bumbling and "even scratching his head." Or Miss Marple, though he doubts she "ever stepped inside a cowshed." He does though, with outlandish results, as when he attempts a country dance. Oh, for a Diamond movie! The mystery is solved as Diamond discovers "nuggets of truth in a chaotic world." Alas, this is the final Peter Diamond mystery. If readers start over with the first, The Last Detective, they're bound to find fresh pleasures.
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November 15, 2024
Superintendent Peter Diamond finds himself down on the farm. After a prologue clearly inspired by the climactic chapter of Frank Norris' epic 1901 novelThe Octopus, Lovesey shows his franchise hero--still resisting the push to retirement--reluctantly accepting the invitation his old deputy Julie Hargreaves has extended to him and his partner, Paloma Kean, to pay an extended visit to the Somerset farm where she lives. Julie, it turns out, didn't leave the service because she wanted to escape Diamond's overbearing manner, but because she was going blind from macular degeneration. But she's still keen-eyed enough to doubt that Claudia Priest was rightfully convicted of manslaughter for causing the death of art dealer Roger Miller, the former lover who was found dead in a grain silo, where he was searching for the garter Claudia playfully hid. Realizing that Julie invited him specifically to reopen the case, Diamond agrees to do so even though he has no legal standing. Aping by turns Poirot and Columbo, he chats up Claudia's other lovers, wealth manager Fabio Fortunato and insufferable Bert Dombey, who'd competed to find that fatal prize, which Claudia insists she put into a bull pen and someone else must have moved to the silo where Roger met his end. While Diamond and Paloma are still onsite, Claudia's released from prison just in time to be accused of killing Diamond's principal suspect. Along the way, Diamond gets to drive a tractor and deliver a calf, all the time laboring to unmask the real murderer before he's unmasked himself, as an unauthorized investigator from the Bath CID. Readers lulled by the bucolic byplay will be pleasantly surprised by the identification of a killer they never suspected.
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