Peter Lovesey

The Vault

A Peter Diamond mystery

A severed hand arrives on the desk of Peter Diamond. He is unexcited. These are old bones from a vault below Bath Abbey Churchyard. But a monstrous mystery with antique connections is beginning.

The vault was once part of the house where Frankenstein was written. And the hand is not mediaeval, as everyone assumed. It dates from the 1980s, when the underground extension to the Roman Baths was constructed. The police inquiry is complicated by a visiting American professor, Joe Dougan, obsessed by Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. When the professor’s wife goes missing, Diamond cannot ignore him.


UK Publisher: Little, Brown, 1999 ISBN 0-316-64646-6
US Publisher: Soho Press, 2000 ISBN 1-56947-208-4
UK Paperback: Time Warner, 2000 ISBN 0-7515-2550-2
Latest US Paperback: Soho Press, 2001 ISBN 1-56947-256-4
Latest UK Paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553635

“Pure joy.”
Gerald Kaufman, The Scotsman

“A stunning tale of the macabre and the mundane.”
Publishers Weekly

“Diamond hunts for a missing professor on the trail of Mary Shelley’s diary. Lovesey interweaves the two stories with effortless skill.”
The Times

“It looks deceptively easy, but this is an author who excels at his craft and keeps coming up with books that entertain and puzzle.”
Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

Waxwork

A Sergeant Cribb novel

CWA Silver Dagger Winner, 1978
Filmed for television by Granada, 1979

By her own confession, Miriam Cromer is a murderess. She is sentenced to death and the hangman travels to London to earn his fee. Then the Home Office is sent a photograph that casts doubt on the confession. The matter must be investigated, and fast. Sergeant Cribb is called in and his investigations produce nothing to ease the minds of the authorities. As he plunges deeper into the relationships and history of the small group connected with the murder, he becomes increasingly suspicious that something very different happened at Park Lodge, Kew Green, on 12th March, 1888.

UK Publisher: Macmillan, 1978
UK Paperback: Penguin, 1979
US Publisher: Pantheon, 1978
US Paperback: Penguin, 1980
Latest US edition, Soho Press, June, 2010

“I have read Waxwork. It is a very clever book. I am not an expert in this kind of literature but it seems to me that this stands pretty high. I congratulate you.”
Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillan, OM

“I couldn’t put it down. I read it at a sitting – or rather, a lying, for I was in the garden at the time and got so absorbed I didn’t notice the sun had burnt the skin off my back! Waxwork is quite the best novel of detection I have read for a long time.”
Ruth Rendell

“Lovesey’s backtwist plotting is pure Christie, but the style, the detail and the deadpan horror are all his own – and absolutely marvellous.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Peter Lovesey triumphs again.”
Graham Lord, Sunday Express

“… excels himself.”
Maurice Richardson, The Observer

“As good a crime entertainment as you could wish for.”
HRF Keating, The Times

“One that can stand among Peter Lovesey’s best.”
Maghanita Laski, The Listener

“Marvellously authentic.”
Washington Post

At once charming, chilling and convincing as if it had unfolded in the Police Intelligence column of April, 1888.”
Michael Demarest, Time

Upon A Dark Night

A Peter Diamond mystery

A young woman emerges from a coma. Who is she, and why was she dumped unconscious in a hospital car park upon a dark night? She is unable to recall anything, even her name. Then Ada Shaftsbury, a big, boisterous shoplifter she meets in a hostel for the homeless, takes up her cause and gives her the temporary name of Rose.

Peter Diamond is already investigating a suspicious death (upon another dark night a woman plunged from the roof of Bath’s Royal Crescent) and is unwilling to get involved. Badgered by Ada, galvanised by another gruesome death, Diamond is forced to admit that Rose is the key to the mystery – but she is no longer there.

His own dark night is just beginning.

UK Publisher: Little, Brown, 1997 ISBN 0-316-63971-0
US Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1998 ISBN 0-89296-669-6
UK Paperback: Warner Books, 1998 ISBN 0-7515-2025-X
Latest US Paperback: Soho Press, 2005 ISBN 1-56947-393-5
Latest UK Paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553642

“It’s masterfully plotted stuff, and distinguished by Lovesey’s array of neatly sketched characters and his deft handling of amnesia.”
Neil Spencer, The Observer

“Peter Lovesey has an extraordinary talent for picking up the conventions of the classic English detective novel and delivering them with an entirely contemporary twist … With consummate skill, Lovesey elaborates a plot with architecture as perfect as the city he writes about.”
Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News

“The threads of Peter Lovesey’s new Peter Diamond mystery twist up so neatly they make a perfect hangman’s noose – another triumph of plotting from this master.”
Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

On The Edge / Dead Gorgeous

Televised as Dead Gorgeous, 2002

Rose and Antonia had a good war. As WAAF plotters they had all the excitement and independence of a difficult and fulfilling job, and all the fun of being two women on an RAF base. But peacetime is a disappointment. Rose’s war-hero husband has turned brutal out. Antonia, bored with her rich manufacturer, wants to move to America with her lover.

But what are plotters for, if not to plot? Antonia’s ruthless scheme would give them what they both want. If Rose doesn’t lose her nerve, they could get away with murder.

UK Publisher: Century Hutchinson, 1989
US Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1989
UK Paperback: Arrow, 1990
US Paperback: Mysterious Press, 1990
Reissued as Dead Gorgeous by Time Warner Paperbacks, 2002
Latest US Paperback: Soho Press, 2002 ISBN 1-56947-309-9
Latest UK Paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553543

“Lovesey is one of the very best of the current generation of crime writers and he controls his plot like clockwork – everything timed to precision so that the final uncertainty is resolved just as the bell tolls … If I were judge I’d pencil this one onto the short list for the ’89 Gold Dagger.”
Tim Heald, Evening Standard

“Brilliant is the only word for veteran Peter Lovesey’s latest venture into the macabre … A whipcrack pace, gasps all the way, and yet another winner for Lovesey.”
Scotland on Sunday

“Never has Lovesey’s wizardry been so effective as in this tale of the duped and the duper … The story dodges from one unguessable outcome to the next.”
Publishers Weekly

“Irrepressible joie de mort.”
New York Times Book Review

Rough Cider

MWA Edgar Award Short List for Best Mystery Novel, 1987
Listed in 100 Favourite Mysteries of the Century

“When I was nine, I fell in love with a girl of twenty called Barbara, who killed herself.”

Theo, a university lecturer, has his early life brought uncomfortably back when, in 1964 he is approached by an American girl called Alice. She wants to be told about her father, a GI hanged for murder in Somerset during World War II. As a boy, Theo had been a principal witness for the prosecution.

Alice persuades him to revisit the farm where Theo was evacuated. She is too young to have known her father, but is staunchly determined to discover the true facts. The horrors of the past take on a frightening immediacy when another murder is committed.

UK Publisher: The Bodley Head, 1986
US Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1987
UK Paperback: Arrow/Mysterious, 1987
US Paperback: Mysterious Press, 1988
Latest US Paperback: Soho Press, 2001 ISBN 1-56947-228-9
Black Dagger/BBC Audiobooks edition: 2007 ISBN 978-1-4056-8568-9
Latest UK Paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553550

“It’s tremendously good. There are a fair number of good crime novels ‘you can’t put down’; but there are very few you feel you want to stop reading because their people are so real and you dread the disasters you foresee for them.”
HRF Keating

“I enjoyed Rough Cider very much indeed, read it at a sitting, as I did Waxwork and The False Inspector Dew. What struck me first of all was that this was yet another new departure for this most versatile author, a (to me) totally unexpected background, period and set of circumstances. The fine writing remains the same, of course, and the care for detail and the precision. The title is provocative but it does little to prepare the reader for a shock event of startling originality. Original the novel certainly is, leaving the reader dry-mouthed. But with no desire for cider as a thirst-quencher.”
Ruth Rendell

“This is a Russian Doll of a book, one secret concealed inside another, one fact leading to another, just the way a whodunit ought to be, but so often is not. It is neatly constructed and written in a quickfire prose style which adds considerably to its appeal.”
Nicholas Best, The Financial Times