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One of the conditions I can suffer from as a reviewer, one which never quite goes away, is 'mystery plot overdose syndrome'. I had a rather acute case reading this latest in Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series. None of the books in this series have ever quite done it for me the way the first one did – I thought THE LAST DETECTIVE one of the best books I read in the 1990s, This one, while it has much of the author's talent, really bugged me. A woman is found hanging in a public area of Bath. Two days later, the father of her children is found hanging. The two had no problems, apparently, but it's decided that she was murdered and he did it. End of case. Diamond, not surprisingly – he is a damn good cop – won't let it go. He has to know some things and despite the pressure from his boss, Georgina Dallymore, he continues to investigate the case. Soon, one of his officers (who uses the computer he still hates) finds some similarities in a case from two years ago. Again, a woman hanged, the husband found two days later. A pattern or a coincidence? Suicides and murder-suicides do happen, of course, but there are a handful of oddities about this and Diamond continues to press for answers. There's the standard sub-plot of the boss lady who just wants to close the case. Readers are perhaps too familiar with this type, the administrator who wants good numbers, closed files, good statistics to please her bosses but it was pretty one-dimensional stuff. And I would argue that no self-respecting homicide cop would just let it go so quickly. Georgina later says something so stupid, so thick, that even Peter Diamond, not the most subtle guy around, is dumfounded; comparing a ram raid – crashing a car into a shop and stealing things – to rape was just horribly out of line and insensitive, even for an administrator. Her ambition brought to mind Stephen Booth's Diane Fry – a character who appears to me to have little empathy. Neither characters shows any real understanding of victims, or a lot of feeling about much other than getting ahead, statistics, and impatience. Diamond's personal life has picked up a bit; for the first time since his wife's murder three years ago, he's actually seeing someone who seems to like him a great deal. I admit to having had some misgivings about this character, or more to the point her son who seems a little too good to be true and a little odd, as if Lovesey didn't quite use the same care in fleshing him out as the more substantial characters within the story. When you read crime novels while suffering from 'overdose syndrome', you tend to see things in big neon letters, There were events or statements made in this book that had me wanting to yell" "Hey, you guys, look over here!" because I saw some threads, some commonalities that seemed obvious and that were ignored. This isn't a good sign; as a reader who leaves the solving up to the detectives, as someone who never tries to solve along with the cops, when I see big honking clues, then something is amiss. How disappointing. It's not like an author of Lovesey's skill and stature, an author who's been writing for us for more than 30 years (the first Diamond book was published in 1991) to be sloppy. If I notice similarities which any good investigator should have seen, it worries me, and makes me wonder if there's an antidote to "MPOS" other than taking a break and reading something else for a while. While I know the limitations of the genre and the structure of mystery plotting does have limitations, I also know it's still possible to be new and fresh and surprise a reader, even one who reads as much as I do. So I just have to express my disappointment at this book. I've tried most of the books in this series; it might be time for me to stop.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, February 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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