Customer Reviews

The Stone Wife: A Peter Diamond Mystery (Unabridged)

I really enjoyed this latest offering but I listened to it rather than read it and it kept me tuned in. I found it tense and exciting in parts but also leisurely in other stretches. I don't mind this as I don't like graphic gore, violence and cruelty at my age preferring a gentler puzzle . No book is perfect but I like the characters Lovesey has introduced to us in previous books and I'm a firm fan. I found myself waiting for Georgina the Assistant Chief Constable to appear and thought she would have had a bigger input as events unfolded. Personally, I wasn't disappointed with this latest book.

Peter Lovesey is one of Britain's great crime writers. His prose style is fluid and lucid, and his plots are usually well thought out. Unfortunately, I think that with The Stone Wife he's beginning to run out of steam, at least with Peter Diamond, the bluff bath detective.

A professor is murdered at an auction, during a failed attempt to steal a piece of masonry allegedly from Chaucer's house. The professor had been bidding high, obsessed as he was with acquiring the piece. his funding came from a rich wife, whose previous husband had been cuckolded by the professor, and had vowed revenge.

Diamond and his team investigate: a jealous colleague, the widow and the ex-husband all come under scrutiny as Sergeant Ingeborg Smith goes undercover in Bristol, attempting to infiltrate the lair of the arms dealer who might have supplied the murder weapon.

So far, so good, but the problem with this novel is the execution, and one can only assume that Lovesey is bored with Diamond. What is he, after all, apart from a bluff, opinionated ageing copper? Killing off his wife and giving him a lady friend hasn't made him interesting. He's not even a particularly good cop- he just thrashes around until something obvious happens. He's not only a bore, but he's boorish as well. Lovesey did write two novels about a former female sidekick of his, which were perfectly okay but she was abandoned after that. Perhaps this is a "pilot" for some novels about Ingeborg Smith, although frankly the sequence involving her and the arms dealer don't half go on, and amount to very little (as does much else in the novel).

I feel like a heel for writing this, because Lovesey has always been a favourite of mine, but I think it's time for him to move on: He's an excellent writer and I would recommend anything in his back catalogue wholeheartedly. But after 400 pages of The Stone Wife I was left feeling unfulfilled and not a little bit bored. Three stars because I'm not saying he can't write - he certainly can. I just think he should be writing something else. Unfortunately, with the current state of publishing, he doesn't get to choose: Waterstone's and the publishers do.