Against the Grain
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
***A new Peter Diamond novel from the CWA Diamond-Dagger-winner Peter Lovesey***
'His work is the gold standard for UK crime fiction writing' DEADLY PLEASURES
'Peter Lovesey writes feel-good crime yet he never lets the comedy vitiate the mystery' THE TIMES
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When his former deputy, Julie, invites Detective Peter Diamond and his partner Paloma to spend a week at her home in the depths of rural Somerset, Diamond is horrified. What could be worse than seven days in the back end of nowhere with nothing to do?
But it turns out that Julie has an ulterior motive. A local woman is doing time for manslaughter after a wild party ended in a tragic accident: a man suffocated in a silo of grain. Nobody in the village has much sympathy for Claudia, the unruly daughter of a wealthy local farmer. Nobody that is, except Julie, who is convinced there's more to this case than there appears, and wants her former boss to investigate.
And as Diamond tests his skills as an amateur sleuth, he soon discovers that the countryside isn't quite so dull as he'd anticipated . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lovesey (Showstopper) concludes his long-running series featuring Bath detective Peter Diamond with a bang, delivering an ingenious fair-play whodunit set in the small English village of Baskerville as the annual harvest festival approaches. While Diamond contemplates retirement, his former colleague, Julie Hargreaves, summons him to Baskerville to investigate a potential miscarriage of justice. Claudia Priest, heir to a local dairy farm, threw a party in which her male guests were tasked with finding a hidden garter. Claudia's ex-boyfriend, art dealer Roger Miller, tracked the item down inside a grain silo, but when he reached for it, the surface of the grain collapsed, and he was sucked under and suffocated. Though Claudia insisted the garter was placed there by somebody else, she was convicted of manslaughter—but Julie's instincts tell her the killer is still at large. Intrigued, Diamond begins interviewing Julie and Claudia's neighbors, leading him to try out a variety of identities before tracking the culprit to the annual festival. Lovesey derives genuine emotion from Diamond's potential retirement, and his golden age–style plotting is as tight as ever. This sends the series out on a high note.
