The Finisher
Detective Peter Diamond Book 19
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Through a particularly tragic series of events, couch potato Maeve Kelly has been forced to sign up for the Other Half, Bath's springtime half-marathon. What Maeve doesn't know is just how brutal some of the other runners are.
As race day draws closer, an Albanian refugee named Spiro makes a run for freedom on the other side of town, escaping the chain gang that has held him hostage and its murderous foreman, who is known to his charges as The Finisher. The Finisher has killed for disobedience before, and Spiro knows there's a target on his back as he tries to lose himself in the genteel medieval city of Bath.
Meanwhile Detective Peter Diamond is tasked with crowd control on the raucous day of the race - and catches sight of a violent criminal he put away a decade ago, and who very much seems to be up to his old tricks now that he is paroled. Diamond's hackles are already up when he learns that one of the runners never crossed the finish line and has disappeared without a trace. Was Diamond a spectator to the prelude to a murder?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MWA Grand Master Lovesey's masterly, atmospheric 19th investigation for Bath, England, Det. Supt. Peter Diamond (after 2019's Killing with Confetti) finds primary school teacher Maeve Kelly in training for a charity half-marathon that's months away. Her troubles begin when a school colleague gives her a Toby jug in return for a British Heart Foundation baseball cap she gave him. She doesn't like the jug, which she accidentally breaks on her way to donate it to a thrift shop. Wracked with guilt after discovering the jug's value, Maeve pledges sponsorship monies from the race to the BHF. In a later, more unsettling incident, she rescues runner Olga Ivanov from an apparent mugging. The day of the marathon, Diamond, who's in charge of crowd control, thinks he spots a killer known as the Finisher, a sexual predator he put away 12 years earlier. Diamond fears the worst after a runner goes missing. The tension rises as Diamond chases the Finisher into the underground labyrinthine quarries near the route of the marathon. Lovesey neatly ties together all the disparate threads as the plot twists and turns to its taut conclusion. On the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Lovesey is still going strong.
