Diamond and the Eye
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Bath antiques dealer has disappeared, and detective Peter Diamond has been saddled with the "help" of a hardboiled Philip Marlowe wannabe private investigator in cracking the case. MWA Grand Master Peter Lovesey's 20th installment in the award-winning series will have readers laughing from the first page.
If there's one thing detective Bath Peter Diamond has no patience for, it's a dumb git trying to get involved in one of his investigations—for example, a Philip Marlowe-wannabee private investigator like the self-styled Johnny Getz (his card claims he Getz results). But fate has saddled Diamond with this trial. A Bath antiques dealer, Septimus "Seppy" Hubbard, has disappeared without a trace, and his daughter, Ruby, has hired Johnny Getz to find him. When a dead body is discovered in Seppy's locked-up store, the missing persons case becomes a murder investigation, and now Diamond has to collaborate with the insufferable private eye.
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At the start of MWA Grandmaster Lovesey's entertaining, often amusing 20th Peter Diamond investigation (after 2020's The Finisher), 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.