Diamond and the Eye (Peter Diamond #20)
by Peter Lovesey
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
Published: October 12, 2021, by Soho Crime
ISBN: 9781641293129 (ISBN10: 1641293128)

CID chief Peter Diamond is back for his 20th caper solving mysteries in Bath, England. Diamond, for those of you who haven’t met him, is one of those classic slightly-offbeat British detectives, brilliant, hard to get close to, and a bit eccentric. He’s backed up by a small team of solid investigators; Ingeborg, the ex-journalist, the hardnosed Haliwell, the recent hire Jean Sharp, and the OCD-driven John Leaman, all of whom dutifully gather up grist for him to mill over. In Diamond and the Eye, however, he gets a hand from an outsider, Johhny Getz, Private Eye.

“Private eye? I thought they went out with Dick Tracy.”
“Dick Tracy was a cop.”
“Sam Spade, then. We’re talking private detectives, are we? I didn’t know we had one in Bath.”  Lovesey, Peter. Diamond and the Eye

Not only is Johhny a PI, but he’s also drunk deeply of every noir classic he could get his hands on. Getz (not his real name), spouting cheap Hollywood dialog, comes off as a ridiculous character at first–the last thing that Diamond needs hanging around in an investigation…or so it seems when Johhny comes marching into Diamond’s favorite pub to convince him to investigate a break-in in an antique store. Break-ins aren’t Diamond’s beat and he doesn’t take well to being cornered by a civilian…but Getz has a way of getting under one’s skin that makes him easier to appease than ignore. All he wants is for Diamond to let his (only) client, Ruby, into the shop to see if anything’s missing. Besides Ruby’s father, that is.

What Diamond and Getz find in the shop sets off a chain of murders around the normally gun-shy city as well as a missing-person case that takes them from the dregs of the criminal underworld to the top of society. Not only does Bath’s brainiest sleuth get the help of a PI, he finds himself saddled with a socialite crime groupie that’s gotten permission to follow the investigation, though her idea of “getting her man” may lean more towards the inspector than the criminal.

Johhny Getz comes off initially as a joke, but the Chandleresque jargon he bandies about turns out to be more than mere affectation as he tackles the missing person’s side of the case, leaving Diamond and his team to the assorted murder and shootings that ensue. Bit by bit this two-bit shamus wins over the reader, and in the end, the crusty chief may find there’s more to him than meets the eye.

Fans of Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series, which we looked at the first and last books of last month, will find a fair amount of resonance in Peter Diamond and his team, though considering that Peter Lovesey has won awards from pretty much every literary crime association there is and has been writing mysteries since 1975, it’s a good bet they’ve already discovered him.

Highly Recommended.

Posted in Gumshoe Review: http://www.gumshoereview.com/php/Review-id.php