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I had a bit of
a problem
with the
British stuff.
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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
Read more about Lovesey here
"Stagestruck"The curtain has barely gone up when the pop star hoping to resurrect her glory days by switching from singing to drama begins to scream and tear at her face. Clarion Calhoun is rushed to hospital, her understudy goes on and the production is put in serious jeopardy.
Disfigured from the caustic drain cleaner someone added to her face powder, Clarion decides to sue the theatre, a catastrophe only slightly diminished when Denise, who applied Clarion’s makeup, commits suicide in remorse. Battling a lifelong fear of theatres, Detective Peter Diamond (Skeleton Hill, 2009, etc.) steps in to sort out matters.
His task is complicated by the actors’ ability to act innocent; the theatre management’s romantic proclivities and financial woes; the appearance of the grey lady (the resident theatre ghost); and the dreaded sighting of two dead tortoiseshell butterflies, which according to theatre lore presage tragedy. Furthermore, Diamond is saddled with Sergeant Dawkins, a vulgarly dressed, loudmouthed pendant who keeps volunteering for more work.
Clarion, for unspecified reasons, drops her lawsuit, but on an unannounced visit to a performance is suffocated anyway with a plastic bag. Determined to get to the bottom of the bathos at Bath and pinpoint the origin of his theatre terror, Diamond slogs on, finally standing center stage to confront at least one of his nemeses.
Far from Lovesey at his best, without the wit, trickery and demonic plotting that has earned him silver, gold and diamond daggers from the
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Soon after World War II, two former co-workers in the operations room of a Royal Air Force squadron meet in the street. Their lives have diverged dramatically but each wants to get rid of her husband. And so a mutual-assistance pact is made.
Rose and Antonia had a good war. As WAAF plotters they had all the excitement and independence of a difficult and fulfilling job, and all the fun of being two women on an RAF base.
But peacetime is a disappointment. Rose’s war-hero husband has turned brutal out. Antonia, bored with her rich manufacturer, wants to move to America with her lover.
But what are plotters for, if not to plot? Antonia’s ruthless scheme would give them what they both want. If Rose doesn’t lose her nerve, they could get away with murder.
