Book description
Skeletal remains are found in a cellar below Bath's Georgian tearooms.
To Peter Diamond's delight they are not all of medieval origin, a radius
proves to be only twenty years old and bears the marks of a sharp
weapon.
While a police team painstakingly sift through the cellar looking for
the rest of the body, Diamond is distracted by the search for a missing
American tourist, the wife of an English Professor who has been behaving
very oddly. What Diamond doesn't know is that the professor believes he
is on the point of locating the diaries of Mary Shelley written whilst
in Bath finishing the manuscript of FRANKENSTEIN.
Suspecting the professor of disposing of his wife but unable to prove
anything, Diamond concentrates on trying to identify whose remains have
been found in the cellar, and by solid old-fashioned detection he does
so with shocking result. But before he can begin to work out who might
have been the killer, the owner of the city's largest 'antique' emporium
is found brutally murdered and the last person known to have seen her
alive is the Professor.
With consummate skill, wit, erudition and ingenuity, Peter Lovesey has
crafted a whodunnit of brilliant complexity and, finally, of total
satisfaction. Lovesey has an extraordinary talent for picking up the
conventions of the classic English detective novel and delivering them
with an entirely contemporary twist. Val McDermid No one has done this
kind of thing better since Dorothy L. Sayers. Mail on Sunday
Satisfyingly complex and suspenseful Daily Mail Peter Lovesey
's novels and short stories have won him awards all over the world,
including the Gold, Silver and Cartier Diamond Daggers of the Crime
Writers' Association, of which he was Chairman 1991-2. He recently won
the CWA Short Story Dagger. He lives in Chichester.
