2007 mystery, the ninth book in Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. A
woman is found hanged in a park in Bath; a few days later her partner
turns up in the same state. A suicide pact?
Lovesey took a four year break after The House Sitter before
returning to Peter Diamond, and the effects seem to have been
positive. Where that book was sometimes grinding and overly tired,
this one feels reinvigorated. There's even diegetic justification:
Diamond, widowed some years ago, starts a new relationship in this
book. Both of them have their baggage and things to hide, and it's a
good portrait of a relationship between two people reluctant to risk
further hurt, though a final revelation doesn't quite ring true. This
bleeds into Diamond's relationships with his subordinates; where he
might have driven another colleague off his team as he did Julie
Hargreaves back in Upon a Dark Night, now he realises he should back
off and even apologise.
But while the secondary stories are good ones, they're always
subordinate to the main mystery. A women is found hanged in a public
park; a man turns up similarly hanged a few days later. It looks like
suicide, or murder-suicide, but there are niggling problems with that
theory which make things less straightforward, particularly for a
stubborn old cop like Diamond who doesn't like being told to wrap
things up quickly and neatly – though for quite a while it seems as
though that's just what's going to have to happen. Then some old
information turns up, and things start to move again.
There are digressions into travelling salesmen, tea dances, ram raids,
the Bath Stone mines under Combe Down, and personal fitness training.
Some material on abortion is a bit heavy-handedly neutral at times,
which I think may be Lovesey trying to avoid being perceived as taking
a political view. There are still problems with modernity: surely, in
2007, when you have a prime suspect for something, you check his
national insurance and DVLA records so that you already know his
address(es) and any car(s) he owns before you go and visit him? Even
if Diamond didn't think of that, wouldn't one of his underlings? More
seriously, the final leap from "the killer must be a person holding
this opinion" to "this specific person, the only one we've met in the
book with this opinion, is the killer" is basically ungrounded in
evidence, and given the seriousness of the accusation I'd have liked
to have seen that conjecture reinforced a bit before it was overtly
acted on. (In fact there was rather more plausible evidence pointing
at someone else, who was completely ignored.)
The basic problem with a serial killer plot is that it's always going
to come down to "a loony did it", an essentially unsatisfying quest
for motive: the reader tries to put something together from the
available evidence, but eventually it will come down to "because he
was mad". That's a weak point here, particularly as the killer's
motive (which he/she apparently wanted to make clear by the means of
killing) takes the police most of the book to discover.
Even so, this is a distinct improvement on The House Sitter.
Followed by Skeleton Hill.
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