Showing results by author "Peter Lovesey" in All Categories

This is collection of 18 crime stories with a diverse range of characters and scenarios, from guilt-ridden fraudsters to lovesick murderers.

Peter Lovesey is a British writer of historical and contemporary detective novels and short stories. His best-known series characters are Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian-era police detective based in London, and Peter Diamond, a modern-day police detective in Bath. Lovesey's novels are entertaining puzzlers in the "Golden Age" tradition of mystery writing.

Full-cast adaptations of five of Peter Lovesey's acclaimed novels featuring Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb and his assistant Constable Thackeray Tough, shrewd and determined, Sergeant Cribb is a stalwart of Scotland Yard's newly formed Criminal Investigation Department. Aided and abetted by...

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 boisterous shoplifter she meets in a homeless hostel, takes up her cause and names her Rose. Peter Diamond is already investigating a suspicious death - a woman has plunged from the roof of Bath's Royal Crescent during a party, and none of the guests seem to know who she is.

There's plenty of drama, of the wrong kind, when a fading pop star wanting to launch an acting career at Bath's Theatre Royal gets taken to hospital with third degree burns. In the best theatrical tradition, the show goes on, but the agony turns to murder. Bath's top detective, Peter Diamond, is on the case—but for reasons he can't understand, he suffers a physical reaction amounting to phobia each time he goes near the theatre. Before he can find the killer, he must face his own demons.

London, 1879. Crowds have gathered at Islington's chilly Agricultural Hall to place their bets on who will become the next world champion in a six-day, 500-mile speed-walking race, the wobble. When one of the highly favored contenders dies under suspicious circumstances, Sergeant Cribb also has a race on his hands - to pursue a ruthless murderer.    

When a severed hand from the vault of Bath Abbey Churchyard arrives on Peter Diamond's desk, he is delighted to hear that, far from being a medieval relic, it is from the 1980s. But the vault is part of the house where Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written, and a fanatical American professor is thwarting their investigation. Events are complicated even further when the professor's wife goes missing....

Peter Diamond, head of Bath CID, takes a city break in Vienna, 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.

Peter Diamond, ex-CID and notoriously difficult to work with, is sacked from his latest job as a security guard in Harrods. Doggedly he turns his sleuthing skills to unraveling the mystery of a little Japanese girl abandoned in London. Naomi, as she is known, exhibits the classic symptoms of an autistic child. Diamond regards her first as a challenge and soon as someone he cares passionately about and devotes himself to communicating with the child.

A woman's naked body is found floating in the weeds of a lake near Bath by an elderly woman walking her Siamese cats. No one comes forward to identify her, and no murder weapon is found, but sleuthing is Superintendent Peter Diamond's speciality. A genuine gumshoe, practising door stopping and deduction: he is the last detective. Struggling with office politics and a bizarre cast of suspects, Diamond strikes out on his own, even when Forensics think they have the culprit.

Detective Inspector Peter Diamond is keen to get his teeth into a new case. So, when a call comes in that a woman's body has been found in one of Bath's parks, he arrives quickly at the scene - only to discover that the victim is his wife.

When his former deputy, Julie, invites Detective Peter Diamond and his partner Paloma to spend a week at her home in the depths of rural Somerset, Diamond is horrified. What could be worse than seven days in the back end of nowhere with nothing to do? But it turns out that Julie has an ulterior motive. A local woman is doing time for manslaughter after a wild party ended in a tragic accident: a man suffocated in a silo of grain. Nobody in the village has much sympathy for Claudia, the unruly daughter of a wealthy local farmer. 

Peter Diamond, the Bath detective brilliant at rooting out murder, is peeved at being diverted to Professional Standards to enquire into a police car accident. Arriving late at the scene, he discovers an extra victim thrown onto an embankment - unconscious and unnoticed. Diamond administers CPR, but no one can say whether the elderly tricyclist will pull through. But why had the man been out in the middle of the night with an urn containing human ashes?

A woman is found strangled on a beach in Sussex. It takes the police 12 days to discover she was a top profiler for the National Crime Faculty. Why was she killed? And why is the NCF thwarting Detective Peter Diamond's efforts to unmask her murderer?

Through a particularly tragic series of events, couch potato Maeve Kelly has been forced to sign up for the Other Half, Bath's springtime half-marathon. What Maeve doesn't know is just how brutal some of the other runners are. As race day draws closer, an Albanian refugee named Spiro makes a run for freedom on the other side of town, escaping the chain gang that has held him hostage and its murderous foreman, who is known to his charges as 'The Finisher'.

Battle and burial are built into the history of Lansdown Hill, so it is no great shock when part of a skeleton is unearthed there. But Peter Diamond, Bath's Head of CID, can't ignore the fresh corpse found close to the folly known as Beckford's Tower. The hill becomes the setting for one of the most puzzling cases he has investigated, involving golf, horseracing, Civil War re-enactment and the Cyrillic alphabet.

In Victorian London, race-walking, or 'wobbles', is all the rage. So on a Monday morning in November 1879, the crowds gather for Islington's bizarre six-day endurance walking race. By Tuesday, one of the contestants is dead. Tetanus from a blister is assumed, but then there is a second death, and this time it's definitely murder. A bemused Sergeant Cribb from Scotland Yard is called in, along with Constable Thackeray, and they soon discover that something foul is at play.

Winner of the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger, the Barry Award and the Macavity Award. 'Darling, if ever I've met a group of potential murderers anywhere, it's the Bloodhounds.' Thus says one of the members of the Bloodhounds of Bath, a society that meets in a crypt to discuss crime novels. But to their latest recruit, they seem just a gaggle of dotty misfits, until one of them reveals that he is in possession of an immensely valuable stamp, recently stolen from the Postal Museum.

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 an 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.

Of all the weird characters Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has met in Bath, this one is the most extreme: a 21st-century private eye called Johnny Getz, whose office is over Shear Amazing, a hairdressing salon. Johnny has been hired by Ruby Hubbard, whose father, an antiques shop owner, has gone missing, and Johnny insists on involving 'Pete' in his investigation. When Diamond, Johnny and Ruby enter the shop, they find a body and a murder investigation is launched.