In the small hours of a Sunday morning in the city of Bath a policeman on beat duty is shot dead by an unseen gunman - the third killing of an officer in Somerset in a matter of weeks. The emergency services are summoned. Ambitious to arrest the Somerset Sniper, the duty inspector, Ken Lockton, seals the crime scene, which is confined by the river on one side and a massive retaining wall on the other. He discovers the murder weapon in a garden - and is himself attacked and left for dead. Enter Peter Diamond, Bath's burly CID chief. Middle-aged and not built for action, he pits himself and his team against the killer in a hunt that will test his physical powers to the limit..
'Fine picture of period vice, good mystery plotting, and fun.' -San Francisco Chronicle A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of the audience. A trapeze artist misses her timing when the trapeze ropes are shortened. A comedian who invites the audience to sing along with him finds the words of his song 'shamefully' altered. Mustard has been applied to a sword swallower's blade. A singer's costume has been rigged. The girl in a magician's box is trapped. Then the mischief escalates to murder. Or was murder intended all along? That indomitable detective team, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray of Scotland Yard, must track down the elusive criminal.
Two police officers are about to head home after a long night shift when they receive one last call. En route to investigate, the patrol car spins off the road, killing one of the exhausted cops and leaving the other in critical condition. Detective Peter Diamond is assigned to look into the case. His supervisor is desperately hoping Diamond will not discover the officers were at fault. Instead, Diamond discovers something even worse-a civilian on a motorized tricycle was involved in the crash and has been lying on the side of the road for hours. Diamond administers CPR, but the man's fate is unclear. Meanwhile, Diamond has become suspicious of the civilian victim and begins a private inquiry that leads to a trail of uninvestigated deaths. As the man lingers on life support, Diamond must wrestle with the fact that he may have saved the life of a serial killer.
In the seventeenth installment in Peter Lovesey's timeless British detective series, Peter Diamond digs deep into Bath history to ferret out the secrets of one of its most famous (and scandalous) icons: Richard "Beau" Nash, who might have been the victim of a centuries-old murder. Bath, England: A wrecking crew is demolishing a row of townhouses in order to build a grocery store when they uncover a skeleton in one of the attics. The dead man is wearing authentic 1760s garb and on the floor next to it is a white tricorn hat-the ostentatious signature accessory of Beau Nash, one of Bath's most famous historical men-about-town, a fashion icon and incurable rake who, some say, ended up in a pauper's grave. Or did the Beau actually end up in a townhouse attic? The Beau Nash Society will be all in a tizzy when the truth is revealed to them. Chief Inspector Peter Diamond, who has been assigned to identify the remains, begins to fantasize about turning Nash scholarship on its ear. But one of his constables is stubbornly insisting the corpse can't be Nash's-the non-believer threatens to spoil Diamond's favorite theory, especially when he offers some pretty irrefutable evidence. Is Diamond on a historical goose chase? Should he actually be investigating a much more modern murder?
A must-listen collection of fifteen bibliomysteries by bestselling and award-winning authors
Bibliomysteries Volume 2 includes:
- 'Remaindered' by Peter Lovesey
- 'The Compendium of Srem' by F. Paul Wilson
- 'The Sequel' by R. L. Stine
- 'Mystery, Inc.' by Joyce Carol Oates
- and many others
A rare stamp and a corpse are discovered in Bath within hours of each other. As he investigates, Inspector Peter Diamond discovers that both the person who found the stamp and the victim belong to the Bloodhounds, an elite group of mystery lovers, who now urge Diamond to bring the murderer to justice. But there's a hitch: the body lies inside a padlocked houseboat and the only key is in the pocket of a man with an airtight alibi.
Dead Dames Don't Sing by John Harvey: Looking for a big payday but finding big trouble instead, ex-London-cop-turned-private-investigator Jack Kiley attempts to uncover the true origins of a controversial, pseudonymously written pulp novel.
The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin: A young Scotsman in Paris is drawn into a shocking mystery that resides within the pages of an unpublished manuscript allegedly penned by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mystery, Inc. by Joyce Carol Oates: When an obsessive collector of bookstores discovers a charming new shop, he decides he must have it at any cost-even if he has to commit murder.
Remaindered by Peter Lovesey: For some nefarious reason, the widow and former associates of a slain gangster are determined to keep the Precious Finds Bookstore open following the unfortunate demise of the shop's owner.
The Book Thing by Laura Lippman: Private investigator Tess Monaghan must help the irascible proprietor of a Baltimore children's bookstore keep her business afloat by unmasking an elusive and utterly ingenious book thief.
One-time police detective Peter Diamond loses his job as a security guard when he fails to spot a small Japanese child hiding in the furniture department of Harrods. Weeks later, she’s still unclaimed; Diamond is unable to forget the frightened eyes of the silent little girl and takes on the challenge of uncovering her identity. Now Diamond is back in the sleuthing business, following a trail that leads from London to New York to Tokyo and to a shocking climax that may shatter his heart or cost him his life.
“An engrossing puzzler.”--The Sunday Times (London)
In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a posh private girls’ school disappears without explanation. None of her students miss her boring lessons, especially since her replacement is a devilishly hunky male teacher with a fancy car. But then her name shows up on a police missing persons list. What happened to Miss Gibbon, and why does no one seem to care?
Meanwhile, detective Peter Diamond finds himself in Sussex, much against his wishes. His irritating and often obtuse supervisor, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore, has made Diamond accompany her on a Home Office internal investigation. A Sussex detective has been suspended for failing to link DNA evidence of a relative to a seven-year-old murder case—a bad breach of ethics. Diamond is less than thrilled to be heading out on a road trip with his boss to investigate a fellow officer, but he becomes much more interested in the case when he realizes who the suspended officer is—an old friend, and not a person he knows to make mistakes.
As Diamond asks questions, he begins to notice unsettling connections between the cold case and the missing art teacher. Could the two mysteries be connected? How many other area disappearances have gone unnoticed and uninvestigated? Diamond and his hapless supervisor have stumbled into a web of related crimes. Will Diamond be able to disentangle them?
Brighton in 1882 is the setting of this novel of crime and tangled emotions. Albert Moscrop, a visitor whose holiday is dedicated to peering through a telescope at the seaside scene, marches down Queen's Road to the beach and draws us through a sequence of disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama, played in the fashionable haunts of the nineteenth-century resort: beach, piers, promenade, swimming bath, aquarium, and Devil's Dyke. A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family of holidaymakers-the Protheros, and especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her excessively for granted. Gradually Moscrop moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder. All Brighton is horrified by the gruesome crime. The local police seek the help of Scotland Yard, which is provided in the persons of Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. These indomitable detectives soon find themselves challenged by the strangest case of their careers, one that is as mystifying as it is macabre.
On Lansdown Hill, near Bath, England, a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers that took place over 350 years ago is annually reenacted. Two of the reenactors discover a skeleton that is female, headless, and only about twenty years old. One of them, a professor who played a Cavalier, is later found murdered. In the course of his investigation, Peter Diamond butts heads with the group of vigilantes who call themselves the Lansdown Society, discovering in the process that his boss Georgina is a member. She resolves to sideline Diamond, but matters don’t pan out in accordance with her plans.
“Thanks to Lovesey’s nonpareil deftness, however, Diamond ultimately prevails over murder past and present. History, humor, inspired clues, maniacal twists, and a paean to the beauty of the Bath countryside. Lovesey, who’s won every prize going, deserves another for Diamond’s tenth.”--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Pop diva Clarion Calhoun has packed the house with a celebrity appearance in Bath’s Theatre Royal production of I Am a Camera. But within moments of her much-anticipated onstage appearance, she is pulled out of character as she screams and claws at her face. When tainted stage makeup is found to have caused the disfiguring burn, fingers point to her makeup artist. Detective Peter Diamond investigates when the makeup artist is found dead, pushed from a catwalk far above the stage. As Diamond digs deeper, he uncovers rivalries among the cast and crew and is forced to confront his own mysterious and deep-seated phobia to find the killer.
“A brilliantly conceived and smartly executed mystery set in the hallowed Theater Royal of Bath...As always, the plot’s the thing with Lovesey, and the solution to the mystery of Clarion’s disfigurement, while arrived at fair and square, is stunning. But the story also has genuine depth and dimension."--New York Times Book Review
