Diamond and the Eye (A Detective Peter Diamond Mystery)

Product Description

A Bath antiques dealer has disappeared, and detective Peter Diamond has been saddled with the “help” of a hardboiled Philip Marlowe wannabe private investigator in cracking the case. MWA Grand Master Peter Lovesey’s 20th installment in the award-winning series will have readers laughing from the first page.

If there’s one thing detective Bath Peter Diamond has no patience for, it’s a dumb git trying to get involved in one of his investigations—for example, a Philip Marlowe-wannabee private investigator like the self-styled Johnny Getz (his card claims he Getz results). But fate has saddled Diamond with this trial. A Bath antiques dealer, Septimus “Seppy” Hubbard, has disappeared without a trace, and his daughter, Ruby, has hired Johnny Getz to find him. When a dead body is discovered in Seppy’s locked-up store, the missing persons case becomes a murder investigation, and now Diamond has to collaborate with the insufferable private eye.

Review

Praise for Diamond and the Eye“Lovesey writes [a] feel-good crime yet he never lets the comedy vitiate the mystery.”
—The Times Saturday Review
“Glory be! British crime novelist Lovesey is back, bringing along his beloved series hero, the grumpy, darkly funny, and—beneath it all—strictly business Peter Diamond, detective inspector with the Bath constabulary. It’s all here: mystery, sparky writing, and a cast of characters who come alive on the page, moving through a tricky plot that we know is playing us for suckers.”

—Booklist, Starred Review

“The action builds to a Poirot-like solution.”
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—Publishers Weekly

“Move over, Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. The Avon and Somerset CID is about to be joined, jostled, and decentered by two other parties interested in an otherwise ordinary burglary.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for the Peter Diamond Investigations

“Lovesey is careful to remind us that Bath holds hidden secrets behind its gracious Georgian architecture . . . Light and dark imagery is a fixture of Lovesey’s Bath novels, in which life is lived on many levels, some in full sunshine and others buried in shadow.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Lovesey, a veteran master of mayhem and misdirection, laces ominous suspense with wit.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Lovesey is the real deal.”

—Seattle Times

“[Lovesey] has created a brisk, colorful page-turner centered on murder and mayhem at the springtime half-marathon in the city of Bath.”

—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A particularly crafty resolution of the enigmatic mystery shows that this long-running series still has plenty of life.”

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

About the Author

Peter Lovesey is the author of more than forty highly praised mystery novels. He has been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and has been awarded the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers, the Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, the
Strand Magazine Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards, and many other honors. He lives in Shrewsbury, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
 
“Mind if I join you?”
     Peter Diamond’s toes curled.
     There’s no escape when you’re wedged into your favourite armchair in the corner of the lounge bar at the Francis observing the last rites of an exhausting week keeping a cap on crime. Tankard in hand, your third pint an inch from your mouth, you want to be left alone.
     The stranger’s voice was throaty, the accent faux American from a grainy black-and-white film a lifetime ago. This Bogart impersonator was plainly as English as a cricket bat. His face wasn’t Bogart’s and he wasn’t talking through tobacco smoke, but he held a cocktail stick between two fingers as if it was a cigarette. Some years the wrong side of forty, he was dressed in a pale grey suit and floral shirt open at the neck to display a miniature magnifying glass on a leather cord.
     “Depends,” Diamond said.
     “