Peter Lovesey

The Stone Wife

A Peter Diamond Mystery

The Stone Wife was published in 2014 in the UK by Sphere and in the USA by Soho Crime.

Just as the bidding gets exciting in a Bath auction house, three armed men stage a hold-up and attempt to steal Lot 129, a medieval carving of the Wife of Bath. The highest bidder, appalled to have the prize snatched away, tries to stop them and is shot dead.

Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad, soon finds himself sharing his office with the stone wife – until he is ejected. To his extreme annoyance, the lump of stone appears to exert a malign influence over him and his investigation. Refusing to be beaten, he rallies his team. The case demands someone goes undercover. The dangerous mission falls to Sergeant Ingeborg Smith, reverting to her journalistic persona to get the confidence of a wealthy criminal through his pop star girlfriend, Soon, murder makes a reappearance.

UK Publisher: Sphere 2014 ISBN: 978-0751554052
US Publisher: Soho Crime 2014 ISBN: 978-1616953935

Praise For THE STONE WIFE:
Daily Mail
“It will hold you to your deckchair even if the sun is not shining.”
– Barry Turner

Library Journal
“A great procedural whodunit with an interesting maguffin. This is the 14th book in the Peter Diamond series and it’s enough to make the readers flip back through the previous thirteen.”
– Douglas Lord

Kirkus Reviews
“All the pleasures you expect from much-honored Lovesey are here.”

Wall Street Journal
“English author Peter Lovesey is himself a master of historical mysteries, but The Stone Wife merely has a historical hook. This lively, surprise-filled police procedural featuring Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond turns on a fatally botched auction-house robbery of a 14th century carving.”
– Tom Nolan

New York Times
“The murder mystery is solved along traditional lines, but it’s the wonderful tidbits of Chaucerian scholarship that enliven the novel . And whatever you think of Peter Diamond, he proves himself a ‘verray parfit gentil knight’.”
– Marilyn Stasio

New York Journal of Books
“Winner of the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers, the Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Macavity, Barry and Anthony Awards, Mr Lovesey more than lives up to his reputation as a brilliant wordsmith, he exceeds it. Superintendent Peter Diamond is a warm, witty and wonderful creation by one of England’s most talented crime writers.”
– Doris R. Meredith

Suspense Magazine
“Peter Diamond is back, embroiled in a mystery that offers a wealth of wit and a true puzzle linked to a historical literary genius . . . As always, the character and his team are sharp, funny, and grab the reader’s attention from beginning to end.”
– Mary Lignor

Deadly Pleasures
“Adding a thriller element to the excellent police procedure, DS Ingeborg Smith goes undercover to try to track down the source of the fatal handgun used in the murder. Nobody writes better crime fiction in the UK than Peter Lovesey. I consider Lovesey to be the reigning king of British crime fiction.”
– George Easter

The Tooth Tattoo – Washington Post Review

The Tooth Tattoo


A Peter Diamond Mystery

Washington Post, April 28, 2013

‘The Tooth Tattoo’ offers fascinating glimpse into string quartets, by way of procedural
By Patrick Anderson

I have no idea how many string quartet aficionados enjoy crime fiction, but they should hasten to read the veteran British writer Peter Lovesey’s fascinating “The Tooth Tattoo.” Strictly speaking, the novel is a police procedural, but the kicker is that the prime suspects in three murders are the members of a world-class string quartet called Staccati.

I hasten to add that readers who, like me, know little or nothing about string quartets (my musical highlight each year is the Birchmere’s Hank Williams tribute) can still savor this ingenious novel.

At the outset, Peter Diamond, who heads the criminal division of the Bath, England, police, is vacationing in Vienna with his elegant friend Paloma. She wants to visit Beethoven’s home, but he’s more interested in seeing highlights — the sewer, the Ferris wheel — of Carol Reed’s Vienna-based 1949 movie classic, “The Third Man.” As they wander, the couple chance upon a flower-strewn memorial to a young Japanese woman who drowned in the Danube a few years earlier. Paloma is moved by the tragedy, but it’s not Diamond’s case, so he’s indifferent. Naturally, she berates him for his alleged inability to express his feelings. “What do you expect?” the detective retorts. “I’m a bloke.”

In this country he’d say, “I’m a guy,” but it’s all the same. So is the outcome: The argument escalates, he stubbornly defends his right to be a guy, and she dumps him.

Soon the drowned woman in Vienna becomes newly relevant when another young Japanese woman is fished out of a canal in Bath — for that is Diamond’s case. He learns that both women loved string quartets, and that Staccati was playing in both Vienna and Bath at about the time they went missing — and possibly were murdered. One of the women had a “tattoo” on her tooth that featured a musical note, although they really aren’t tattoos but small chips that can be glued on. That’s the source of the book’s title, which is the only thing I didn’t like about it.

We soon learn a lot about the four members of Staccati. Ivan, a dour Russian violinist, co-founded the group with a woman called Cat, who is huge (“the girth of a sumo wrestler”), bawdy and a virtuoso on the cello. Andrew, the second violinist, is brilliant musically, although he rarely speaks and is thought by the others to be autistic. Finally, there’s Mel, the newcomer to the group, who plays the viola, chases girls in his spare time and was recruited to replace Harry, who mysteriously vanished after a concert in Budapest. The four argue a lot and have little in common except their love of music, but that’s enough to keep them together.

Lovesey has won many prizes for his crime fiction; we expect fine writing and devilish plots from him. But the wonder of this novel is how deep he carries us into the world of a string quartet. He knows the music, and he makes clear its beauty, its challenges and the passions it arouses in both musicians and their audiences.

One highlight of the novel is a two-page, all but microscopic description of the quartet’s rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 131. Here’s a small sample: “Toward the middle of the first movement the violins speak to each other with the last six notes of the fugue motif and then viola and cello take up the dialogue in one of the loveliest passages in the entire quartet repertoire.”

This novel will probably teach you more than you ever expected to know about string quartets. Did you know that celebrated players often use instruments on loan from wealthy collectors? Mel is using a rare 1625 Amati viola, valued at more than a half-million dollars, and only too late he discovers that there’s no such thing as a free viola.

You’ll learn of their frustrations, too. Cat denounces what she calls the “music merchants,” of whom she says: “They take second-rate artists with pretty faces, groom them, call them the voice or the player of the century, and turn them into stars. .?.?. The quality of the sound is crap, they’re off-key, and the great gullible public doesn’t seem to notice.”

Eventually, the deaths of the two young women are followed by that of someone close to the group. We agonize over whether one of these dedicated musicians could be a killer — or is the culprit an outsider? — but Diamond sorts things out with his usual aplomb. Lovers of good music and a good mystery should not miss this delightful tale.

Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

THE TOOTH TATTOO

By Peter Lovesey

Soho. 348 pp. $25.95

See more information about The Tooth Tattoo here on PeterLovesey.com

[This review originally appeared in the Books section of the Washington Post]

The Tooth Tattoo

A Peter Diamond Mystery

Peter Diamond, head of Bath’s CID, takes a city break in Vienna, where his favourite film, The Third Man, was set, but everything goes wrong and his companion Paloma calls a halt to their relationship.

Meanwhile, strange things are happening to jobbing musician Mel Farran, who finds himself scouted by methods closer to the spy world than the concert platform. The chance of joining a once-famous string quartet in a residency at Bath Spa University is too tempting for Mel to refuse.

Then a body is found in the city canal, and the only clue to the dead woman’s identity is the tattoo of a music note on one of her teeth. For Diamond, who wouldn’t know a Stradivarius from a French horn, the investigation is his most demanding ever. Three mysterious deaths need to be probed while his own personal life is in free fall.

UK Publisher: Sphere 2013 ISBN: 978-0751550610
US Publisher: Soho Press 2013 ISBN: 978-1616952303

The Tooth Tattoo In The Washington Post
Patrick Andersen, reviewing The Tooth Tattoo for The Washington Post, said: “Lovesey has won many prizes for his crime fiction; we expect fine writing and devilish plots from him. But the wonder of this novel is how deep he carries us into the world of a string quartet. He knows the music, and he makes clear its beauty, its challenges and the passions it arouses in both musicians and their audiences.”
You can also read the full Washington Post review of The Tooth Tattoo.

The New York Times (Marilyn Stasio):
“For want of a better term, Peter Lovesey’s novels about Peter Diamond, the chief of detectves in the historic English city of Bath, are designated as police procedurals. But these erudite and wondrously witty books are unlike any police procedural you’ve ever read. THE TOOTH TATTOO is a case in point. Of course there’s a murder to be solved – a curious one, involving a young Japanese music lover who has come to Bath in hopes of hearing a celebrated string quartet known as the Staccati. But for the most part, the murder investigation provides the structural framework for a group portrait of the eccentric members of this captivating ensemble and the music they play with such rapturous devotion.

Lovesey’s droll humor is on ample display as the members of Diamond’s investigative team poach ideas from “CSI” and tease their gloomy chief for behaving like the depressive Scandinavian policemen in popular fiction (There are also inside jokes for the musically minded like the one about Odessa being the source of all the world’s great string players). Even the murder investigation is fun, but in its own peculiar way; but for death-defying thrills, nothing quite compares to the Staccati swinging into Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor.”

And from The Daily Mail (Barry Turner):
CLASSIC CRIME
“I must resist saying Peter Lovesey is at the peak of his game since, judging by past experience, he will soon produce another book that is even better than THE TOOTH TATTOO. Let it suffice to say that this is one of his best.

For his latest outing, the thoroughly unpretentious Peter Diamond of Bath CID finds himself adrift in the world of classical music. What is the link between members of a highly regarded strong quartet and he death of a Japanese student who had come to Bath to hear them play? . . . Vivid characterisation and convincing dialogue confirm Lovesey’s reputation as a master storyteller.”

You can watch Peter discuss The Tooth Tattoo at this event organised by The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Arizona
[TheToothTattooPoisonedPen]

You can see this video on the Livestream website as well.

Libraries: My Life Support

Mystery Writer Peter Lovesey Pays His Dues

BUDGET CUTS FORCE LIBRARY CLOSURES is a headline that sends shivers up my spine. For me as a career writer, libraries are my life support system. I couldn’t have survived forty years in the business without you. I am thankful, of course, for the steady sales of my books, but there is much more I rely on. From the beginning libraries have provided me with happy discoveries, inspiration, guidance, research opportunities, the chance to meet my readers and, in a way I shall explain, the opportunity to travel across America.

I’m a library junkie.

The addiction dates from 1944, when I was eight. World War Two was raging and our house in suburban London was destroyed by a V1 bomb. Miraculously my family survived. My two brothers crawled out of the rubble. My father was away in the army, my mother was out shopping and I was at school. But of course we were homeless and for a long time we had other priorities than books and reading. The time came when we were in temporary housing and I felt the strong need of something to read. At an age when my imaginative life had been transformed by the magic of reading, we didn’t have a book in the house. I joined the junior section of the Whitton branch library and soon appreciated the treasures there, hidden as they were in dreary cloth bindings and printed on wartime economy paper. Richmal Crompton’s William books were an early discovery, funny, anarchic and beautifully written. I have been a regular borrower of books ever since.

Fast forward to the 1960s and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale in north London, the nearest place to a time machine that I know. This was before newspapers were microfilmed, let alone digitalized. I handled real papers more than a century old. I’m not sure how I qualified for a ticket, but there I could travel back to the 1860s gathering material for articles on sports history that ultimately were shaped into my first book, The Kings of Distance.

About the same time, I started a bibliography of all the track and field books ever published in Britain. This took me to Bloomsbury and the Reading Room of the British Library. The staff allowed me access to the card index to fill in gaps in the main catalogue and I passed many hours listing long-forgotten works. The project got into print in 1969 and was updated in 2001 as a British Library publication, An Athletics Compendium, with my co-authors Andrew Huxtable and Tom McNab.

My crime writing career grew out of the sports interest, strongly backed by library research. Wobble to Death (1970), was about murder in a Victorian long distance race and won a £1000 first crime novel prize. The historical basis for this was discovered largely at the newspaper library but also at Islington public library, close to the Royal Agricultural Hall, where the story was set. My policemen, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, continued into seven books and later a TV series. Each novel and script reflected some aspect of Victorian entertainment researched in my local library or from books borrowed through inter-library loans.

One of the unsung joys of using a library is browsing the shelves and making discoveries impossible in any other situation. I can’t recall why I was looking at books on wine-making one day. It’s not a hobby I’ve ever taken up, or wanted to. I picked one off the shelf and came across a description of the way cider was made on farms in the pre-war era. The farmer would suspend a joint of meat in the keg to assist the process. When the cider was ready, only the bone was left, picked clean by the action of fermentation. This was the inspiration for a mystery of mine called Rough Cider and featuring a human skull discovered in a barrel. That kind of serendipity illustrates the magic of libraries.

By this time I had received my first invitation to speak to a local audience in a library. Daunting, when you haven’t done it before, even in a setting that is your second home. I struggled through and got better at it by trial and error. Some time after, at a lunch organized by the Crime Writers’ Association, several of us happened to get talking about the loneliness of the library lecturer. Wouldn’t it make the ordeal easier to endure if three or four of us got together as a team, gave short presentations and shared any questions? We must have drunk heady wine. We decided to give the idea a shot, found it agreeable and began approaching libraries looking for gigs. In no time, the “presentation” took on entertainment elements such as a mock radio reading with sound effects, something called “crime mime time” and a re-enactment of the secret initiation ritual of the hallowed Detection Club. We called ourselves Murder We Write.

Now it happened that two of our team, Paula Gosling and Michael Z.Lewin, were American writers living in England. The others, Liza Cody and I, were the Brits. Mike Lewin made a family visit to New York and decided to sound out some American public libraries about the possibility of bringing Murder We Write across the ocean. He’s a persuasive man. He was using the phone, for this was before the internet became a universal tool. Not only did he set up a tour of seven States, but he negotiated fees that more than paid for the trip. The American Bookseller in July, 1990, wrote “What do you get when you combine a Plymouth Grand Voyager, four prominent mystery writers living in southern England, and an itinerary that includes stops in 10 American cities from Massachusetts to Michigan? For three weeks this last May, they became the Murder We Write roadshow. The performances were a far cry from the traditional author tour . . . They mixed dramatic readings, skits and discussions of issues in their works and the genre that was part literary event, part vaudeville.”

A major factor in the success of the roadshow (it continued through the nineties in various incarnations and combinations as Partners in Crime and Wanted for Murder) was that we visited libraries, rather than bookstores. Large audiences, accustomed to attending lectures and talks, enjoyed the performance aspects of our show. We even learned juggling to illustrate the complexities of writing a book.

The web may have changed the way things are done, but there’s a massive difference between sitting in front of a computer and visiting a library. I won’t deny that I use Google for information I need, but there are limits to what a search engine can provide. It can’t offer me the joy of meeting readers in a library or getting advice and expert help from real people who know more than I about resources. Human contact needs to be cherished in this computer age. I’m even wary of computers crowding out the book space in libraries. A few years ago I wrote a competition story for the local paper, called Murder in the Library, with a plot involving a blackmailer murdered, appropriately, in a carrel containing a microfilm viewer. His victims had been paying him with banknotes secreted in returned library books. It’s always worth leafing through the pages; you never what you’ll find.

And what joy there is rooting around in card indexes and files of newspaper clippings. For my latest book, Stagestruck, set mainly in the Theatre Royal, Bath, I asked to see Bath library’s clippings from the local paper. There I found graphic accounts of sightings of the theatre ghost, the grey lady, and of the mysterious butterfly that augurs a success or a death. Of course this had to go into the novel.

Let’s admit I have a vested interest in the future of the library system. I rely on it more than most. But I can see how important it is in the lives of many others: the children who come to listen to stories, the students wanting a congenial place to study, the people seeking information, the audiences enjoying talks and lectures and the older generation glad of a place to sit down and read a magazine or a newspaper. The library is the hub of the community. Every closure diminishes our society.

—

Peter Lovesey is the author of more than thirty mysteries and numerous short stories. His work has been adapted for radio, TV and film. He has won many awards including the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2000. His latest novel featuring Bath detective Peter Diamond is Stagestruck, published by Soho Press.

Cop To Corpse

A Peter Diamond Mystery

Hero to zero.

Cop to Corpse.

One minute PC Harry Tasker is strolling up Walcot Street, Bath, on foot patrol. The next he is shot through the head. No scream, no struggle, no last words. He is picked off, felled, dead.

Peter’s new book appears from Sphere in the UK on 5 April, 2012 and from Soho Press in the USA in June, 2012. Bath detective Peter Diamond takes on the most dangerous assignment of his career when he goes in search of the Somerset Stalker, a killer who is targeting policemen in West Country towns. After a constable from Diamond’s own police station is murdered in the small hours of a Sunday morning a desperate hunt follows. Action, menace and courage in the face of extreme danger are the driving forces of this story laced with the surprises that always lie in wait in a Lovesey novel.

UK Publisher: Sphere 2012 ISBN: 978-1847445711 – April 2012
US Publisher: Soho Press 2012 ISBN: 978-1616950781 – June 2012

Cop to Corpse is now in paperback

“Who’s gunning for beat cops? That’s the frantic question Peter Diamond must try to answer in British author Peter Lovesey’s superlative twelfth novel featuring the irascible Chief Superintendent . . . Lovesey, winner of the CWA Gold and Silver Dagger, leavens the suspense with Diamond’s trademark gallows humor, and closes with one of his cleverest solutions.” Publishers Weekly

“Nobody but Lovesey could thump out a gritty procedural yet instill Bath with so much charm and history that readers will have to put it on their bucket lists.” Kirkus Reviews

“I’ve been a fan of Peter Lovesey’s ever since Sergeant Cribb investigated a Victorian murder in Wobble to Death. Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series is one of the best of the current crop of British cop-shop books. His books always have a tight plot and very professional sets of clues and investigators, and this one, the 12th, is one of his best . . . If you’re not already a fan of Lovesey and Diamond, start here.” Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail, Toronto

“There are some days when only a good book will do. You want a novel written by a master of his craft. You want characters sympathetically but never sentimentally drawn, with believable relationships, good and bad. You want a topical crime (as I write, a gunman in France is taking out policemen with an assault rifle) and even if it looks as if a serial killer is at work, you don’t want to sigh at the vicious predictability of the murders. You want action, but never excessive violence, and certainly no gratuitous, stomach-churning detail. You want pace, controlled as if by a conductor on his podium. You want an always readable style, with the author assuming you’ve got an intelligent, educated mind, but never being self-indulgent and signalling every clever turn of expression with a wave. You want a frisson of pleasure at the entirely satisfying denouement. You want Peter Lovesey’s latest crime investigation, Cop to Corpse. Set in present day Bath, this exemplary crime novel traces the investigation when the third policeman in the area is killed by a sniper within twelve weeks. This isn’t Bath of the warm stone and wonderful vistas set jewel-like amidst green hills. It’s a city where people live and die, and the scenery conceals places to hide and hinders police operations. I don’t need to say any more. Go and buy it now.” Judith Cutler, Shots Crime & Thriller Ezine

“The pacing is relentless in this well-plotted mystery. The engaging Peter Diamond is rarely far afield, involved in nearly every aspect of the criminal investigation . . . Cop to Corpse is a strong entry in this already strong series of mysteries and police procedurals.” Mysterious Reviews

“Peter Lovesey is one writer who rises to the challenge again and again. . . . The story may be unorthodox, but it is certainly entertaining and proof – were it needed – that one of Britain’s most distinguished mystery novelists is still as good at keeping us guessing as ever. Long may he continue to entertain his many fans.” Martin Edwards, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?