Bloodhounds

I came upon Lovesey quite by accident & have been pleasantly surprised & entertained. I have now read all 8 of the series featuring the curmudgeonly Inspector Peter Diamond & they make for a quick, enjoyable romp. These are not taunt thrillers but tongue-in-cheek good old fashioned murder mysteries, set in Bath, England. Diamond & his team solve their puzzles one piece at a time in the way good Policemen do. I heartily recommend these engaging stories.

The Bloodhounds are a weird mystery fan group who meet in strange places like crypts to hold discussions. Just prior to tonight's meeting Milo finds a rare Penny Black stamp inside a John Dickson Carr novel; the stamp was recently stolen from the Postal Museum. Not long afterward, Milo is found dead in his locked riverboat and the stamp is missing. The killer sends riddles to the police and the media driving an already irate Bath Detective Superintendent Diamond up a wall while his staff interviews the other members of the Bloodhounds. Diamond soon comes up with a theory on how the killer escaped the locked riverboat puzzle, but that fails to get him any closer to identifying the culprit making him wonder if his hypothesis is sending him down the wrong path. Paying homage to John Dickson Carr, no one writing today does locked room mysteries as good as Peter Lovesey does. In his fourth Diamond police procedural (see THE LAST DETECTIVE, DIAMOND SOLITAIRE, and THE SUMMONS) is a terrific tale that grips readers as the cops question the obsessed Bloodhounds only to uncover all sorts of personal secrets, but no murder motive as none seems like a thief. Diamond remains cantankerous perhaps more so this time because the serial killer is laughing in public at his foibles. Besides the locked room, Mr. Lovesey pulls a brilliant sleight of the hand that will fool and satiate the audience. Harriet Klausner

In some ways this book was excellent. The "locked-room" aspect of the book was very well done, and Peter Lovesey is an excellent author. I love Peter Diamond, but that's where I felt the book fell down a bit. I read these books because Peter Diamond is such a wonderful character, but I found that he wasn't as real in this one as in the previous three that I've read. He's still an accident-prone curmudgeon, but I didn't see the human side as much. Maybe that's because we didn't see much of his wonderful wife Stephanie . She is a wonderful foil to the irascability of Diamond. But the book is good nontheless. It's a page-turner and keeps you guessing until the end. We see the inevitable twisted mind as the perpetrator of these fantastic crimes.

The Bloodhounds of Bath are a group of eccentric mystery readers with disparate tastes: Shirley-Ann, who reads all sorts of mysteries, "even the dreadful ones"; Miss Chilmark, who is obsessed with Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"; Milo, who likes the classic puzzle story; Jessica, who specializes in female-P.I. novels; Rupert, who's into hard-boiled, noir crime fiction and sneers at cozies as fairy tales for grown-ups with arrested development; Sid, an extreme introvert who's a John Dickson Carr fan; and Polly, the tactful group chairwoman. One of the members is found dead in a locked-room situation on a houseboat called the Mrs. Hudson. And somebody has carried off a major heist after sending a cryptic riddle message to the news media challenging the police to stop the crime. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, who has been yearning for a puzzling case to work on, has reason to believe the murder and the theft are related. "Bloodhounds" is replete with playful references and allusions to a wide range of detective fiction. It's a very well-written and cleverly plotted mystery, with lots of interesting characters, that will appeal to readers who like traditional whodunits. And for John Dickson Carr fans, it's one that definitely should not be missed.

This is the first Peter Lovesey novel I've read, and it was done well enough that I'd willingly read others. The attraction for me was the locked room aspect, as this is my favorite variety of classic puzzler, or "cozy" if you will. Although the puzzle itself fooled me, I admit it's not up to the level of the master, John Dickson Carr. Even so, it was grounded in a greater procedural realism than you find in Carr, and that in itself lent greater plausibility to the story. Locked room mysteries at their best are pretty far-fetched, but Bloodhounds contains one that's more believable than most. The discussions of classic mystery novels are appealing but, despite another reviewer's comments, do not overshadow the story itself. The characters are well-drawn if not necessarily explored in depth, and the pace is very good. I have no qualms about recommending this one.