Peter Lovesey

The Last Detective

A Peter Diamond Mystery

Anthony Award Winner

The naked body of a woman is found floating in the weeds in a lake near Bath. No one is willing to identify her. There are no marks and there is no murder weapon – a real test of the sleuthing ability of Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond. He is the last detective, not some lad out of police school with a degree in computer studies, but a genuine gumshoe whose heroes wore trilbies and raincoats and solved crimes by question and answer, doorstepping and deduction.

Challenged by petty office politics, frustrated by obstructive tactics, Diamond strikes out on his own. Despite disastrous personal consequences, the last detective exposes the uncomfortable truth.

UK Publisher: Scribners, 1991
US Publisher: Doubleday, 1991
UK Paperback: Warner Futura, 1992
US Paperback: Bantam, 1992
Latest US Paperback: Soho Press, 2000 ISBN 1-56947-209-2
Latest UK Paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553680

“This is his first crime story with a contemporary setting, and it is a brilliant performance … We shall be lucky if we get a more baffling or entertaining crime puzzle to read this year.”
Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement

“The master of the Victorian detective novel turns, for the first time, to a modern whodunit; and a terrific job he makes of it.”
Marcel Berlins, The Times

“Mr Lovesey maintains a wonderful tone throughout, pitched somewhere between the ring of truth and the call of the loon … A comedy of bad manners, full of oddball characters and wacky events develops into a perfectly realized murder mystery whose skilful misdirection never oversteps the bounds of fair play.”
Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

” The Last Detective is a bravura performance from a veteran showman: slyly paced, marbled with surprise and, in the end, strangely affecting.”
Josh Rubins, New York Times Book Review

“A marvellous achievement – masterfully plotted and totally absorbing over its entire 330 pages.”
Allen J. Hubin, Deadly Pleasures

The Summons

A Peter Diamond mystery

The Macallan CWA Silver Dagger Winner, 1995
MWA Edgars shortlist, 1995
Critics Choice Awards Selection, 1995

The summons comes at night. Two policemen collect Peter Diamond from his West London flat and drive him to Bath. Once he was head of the murder squad there. These days he is out of touch, unaware of an audacious escape from Albany Prison.

Four years previously, a Swedish woman journalist was murdered in Bath in bizarre circumstances, her mouth stuffed with red roses. The investigation had been headed by Diamond. Now the convicted murderer is at large. Worse, he has kidnapped the daughter of the Assistant Chief Constable. He is demanding that the case be re-examined and he will deal only with Diamond.

UK Publisher: Little, Brown, 1995 ISBN 0-316-91078-3
US Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1995 ISBN 0-89296-551-7
UK Paperback: Warner Books, 1996 ISBN 0-7515-1627-9
US Paperback: Mysterious Press, 1996 ISBN 0-446-40369-5
Latest US paperback: Soho Press, 2004 ISBN 1-56947-360-9
Latest UK paperback: Sphere, 2014 ISBN 978-0751553666

“Diamond is forever. The outcome is a masterly surprise. This is the best of Lovesey’s Diamond novels to date.”
John Coleman, The Sunday Times

“The Summons is a classic.”
The Economist

“Diamond’s adventures get better and better – and this could be the jewel in Lovesey’s crown.”
Yorkshire Post

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