Last year, I read the first book in Peter Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series, The Last Detective. And I didn’t like it. The mystery was merely okay and I found Diamond insufferable. It put me off both the character and the author for a time. However, I’ve been getting back into Lovesey recently, and so I decided to return…for the third book in the series. I read a review of the second, Diamond Solitaire, that was pretty negative, and Lovesey himself seemed to be struggling for what to do with the series, based on an essay of his that I read. So I skipped ahead to the third book, The Summons.
The book opens with the daring prison escape of John Mountjoy. He’s been imprisoned for four years for the murder of Britt Strand, an investigative journalist who was on the verge of exposing a scam he was running at his school. Combined with his history of violence towards women and the fact that he was the last to see her alive, he was the obvious suspect. Now he’s free, and he’s kidnapped the daughter of Assistant Chief Constable Tott. He wants to speak to the man who arrested him in the first place: Peter Diamond.
Problem: Diamond left (i.e. quit) the force. The police are able to wrestle him into helping long enough to meet with Mountjoy and lay out his demands: Find the actual killer. An absurd request, but Peter has to admit that this is a lot of effort when he could easily have gone underground. And the police never did find the murder weapon. Nor did they find out who ordered the red roses found in Britt’s bedroom and stuffed down her throat…
So Peter teams up with DI Julie Hargreaves to track down the old witnesses and go over the evidence again before the trigger-happy brass find Mountjoy themselves. Could the killer have been one of Britt’s other boyfriends? Could the police have missed one? Maybe it has something to do with one of her final projects: a report on a group of “crusties” squatting in an abandoned home. As the two dig deeper, Peter starts to remember how much he loved his old job…
I admit, I went in expecting not to like this book after bouncing off the first so bad. So I was surprised to find myself pretty quickly invested in the plot. The mystery is pretty interesting, and Lovesey wastes little time in getting to the point. Diamond and Hargreaves make a great team as well. When Diamond is focusing on the investigation, he’s great, a dogged detective with a good mix of charm and intimidation depending on who he’s talking to. Of course, when he’s taking advantage of this situation to get his job back, I wanted someone to sock him in the jaw, though thankfully this is a small portion of the book. The bulk is focused on the mystery.
Of course, this is a police procedural like the Kate Ellis I reviewed earlier this month. But there’s more cluing here. The key information is only discovered pretty late in the book, but there are clues pointing to some of the conclusions Diamond comes to throughout the book. With a little more work, this could have been a really good mystery novel. But I don’t want to take away from what’s here, which is still a very solid police procedural with plenty of twists and turns along the way. And finally, the reason for the roses is pretty good.
All in all, I really liked this book. I really expected this to be a slog on my way to the locked room mystery Bloodhounds, but now I’m not only looking forward to that book, but to others in this series. In light of that, I can only say that this is Recommended.
Other Reviews: Mystery*File.
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