Another One Goes Tonight

May 9, 2016
Edgar-finalist Lovesey’s superior 16th whodunit featuring Det. Supt. Peter Diamond (after 2015’s Down Among the Dead Men) offers fair play fans a delightfully clever puzzle that toys with their expectations. Diamond, the irascible head of Bath’s CID, isn’t pleased when his boss, Georgina Dallymore, pulls him from his regular duties to look into the circumstances of a police car crash that killed the driver, Police Constable Aaron Green, and badly injured his passenger, Sgt. Lew Morgan. Georgina hopes that Diamond’s review of the evidence will rule out any police negligence. His visit to the crime scene yields a dramatic surprise—the body of an elderly man who was apparently struck by the vehicle while riding a motorized tricycle. Diamond’s heroic efforts at CPR save man’s life, but the unidentified accident victim remains unconscious, leaving the circumstances of the collision obscure. Lovesey taunts readers with extracts from what appears to be a serial killer’s diary while building up to an ingenious final reveal that highlights his gift for misdirection. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider.

May 1, 2016
Sent to look into an accident involving two fellow officers from the Avon and Somerset Police, DS Peter Diamond finds himself improbably but compellingly on the trail of an unusually cold-blooded serial killer.Georgina Dallymore, the boss whom Diamond's recently been closer with than he'd wanted (Down Among the Dead Men, 2015), wants her star investigator to exonerate Lew Morgan and Aaron Green, the two uniformed officers who'd crashed their patrol car in an effort to avoid hitting Ivor Pellegrini, an old man on a homemade tricycle who now lies in a coma at the Royal United Hospital. It's too late to question Green, who was killed in the crash, and Morgan didn't see enough to settle things. But that mostly turns out to be beside the point, because Diamond, who was responsible for spotting Pellegrini hours after the accident, giving him life-saving CPR, and sending him to the hospital, is soon pursuing an altogether different case. People close to Pellegrini have been dying, apparently of natural causes, at an alarming rate in recent months. The dead, all connected to the Great Western Railway Society, of which Pellegrini has been a mainstay, include Massimo Filiput, his old friend Cyril Hardstaff, Cyril's wife, Winnie, and perhaps others. Who would take the trouble to kill so many inoffensive old people, and how, and why? It's only after getting tricked into swallowing a red herring deeply laid by the killer, who duly notes the triumph in an encrypted journal, that Diamond eventually identifies his quarry, a deceptively minor character who turns out to be a good deal more major than he'd suspected. On the long side but so fast-paced you won't care: another absorbing, resourceful English procedural from one of the best.

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May 1, 2016

Lovesey's latest Peter Diamond procedural (after Down Among the Dead Men) has the Bath detective outside of his normal purview when he is asked to conduct an internal investigation into a fatal crash involving two officers responding to a call at the end of their shift. To Diamond's horror and astonishment, he finds an almost lifeless pensioner who must have been involved in the accident and resuscitates him using CPR. However, as he looks further into what the elderly man was doing out late at night on a motorized tricycle, he begins to wonder if he might have saved the life of a serial killer. In tracing the events of that evening, Diamond stumbles onto something larger and deadlier than the original investigation warranted. VERDICT Lovesey delivers a page-turner complete with a likable protagonist whose encounters with authority bring humor to a whodunit with an amazing conclusion. [See Prepub Alert, 2/1/16.]--Lisa O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs., Winnipeg

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
The elderly English gentleman in knickers and a Holmesian deerstalker is putt-putting down a darkened road on his motorized tricycle when a traffic smashup occurs. He's brought back from the dead by Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, who has arrived in time to administer CPR. Afterward, Diamond is perplexed by the emotional bond the act created, and the puzzlement turns creepy when Diamond discovers sinister things in the old guy's history. Has he rescued a monster? Lovesey's fans will be overjoyed to watch his series hero, Diamondsmart, obstinate, slyly funnyback in action (this is the sixteenth in the much-loved series), and they'll love just as much being made into chumps by a complex plot that the author takes pains eventually to clarifyjust before he lets us know we've missed everything. Pacing, dialogue, exposition, backstorynobody handles them better than Lovesey, who always writes elegantly while spinning a tough-minded police procedural. Diamond knocks on doors, endures uncooperative and occasionally abusive witnesses, sits through tedious interrogations, pushes himself beyond exhaustion, and lets us know everything he knows. So how come he can figure everything out and we can't?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)