Diamond and the Eye - Peter Lovesey

Written by Peter Lovesey
Read by James Langton
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Peter Diamond Series, Book 20
Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: October 19, 2021
Duration: 09:09:47

Bath police detective Peter Diamond suffers no fools. Now his nightmare has come to pass: he has to collaborate with the most preposterous kind of fool he can imagine.

The self-styled Johnny Getz (his business card proclaims he “Getz Results!”) is a private investigator who has been hired to track down Septimus “Seppy” Hubbard, a missing antiques dealer whose case Diamond has been assigned by the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad. Johnny Getz is a Philip Marlowe wannabe, complete with ridiculous private eye duds and a frustratingly high (and inaccurate) opinion of his detection skills. But is Getz’s real job to find a missing victim or to stymie Diamond’s progress?

In this celebration of the mystery genre’s greatest practitioners and most outrageous heroes, Peter Lovesey delivers another perfect Golden Age–style puzzle mystery, rippling with unforgettable one-liners and slapstick adventure, and sparkling with brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

Publishers Weekly…”At the start of MWA Grandmaster Lovesey’s entertaining, often amusing 20th Peter Diamond investigation, the Bath, England, detective superintendent is annoyed to be accosted at a pub by private eye Johnny Getz (his business card reads: Getz results), who needs Diamond’s help. Getz has been hired by Ruby Hubbard to find her antique dealer father, who went missing after a recent break-in at his shop. Since the shop is now a crime scene, Ruby needs police permission to enter the premises and see what was taken. Diamond reluctantly joins forces with Getz, and the mismatched duo soon stumble on a corpse in a mummy case, the first of several bodies. Meanwhile, Ruby is shot in the head and slips into a coma. Chapters narrated by Getz, full of 1940s American slang (“I’m a take-whatever-comes-and-sock-it-back-to-them kind of guy”) and put-downs of Diamond (“Everything about him screamed idle bastard”), enliven what he calls the “snaggy saga” as the action builds to a Poirot-like solution to the “wandering father job.” Though this is a slighter entry in the Diamond canon, fans won’t be disappointed.”