Tangled Web UK Review November 2000
The Reaper by
Peter Lovesey
hbk out May 00
Published by Little,Brown
at £16.99
The disappointment one experiences when coming to the end of a new novel by Peter Lovesey is of the blissful kind. It’s the sense of regret that an intensely pleasurable read is over and that it will be another year or so before the maestro publishes his next smoothly enjoyable mystery. This latest, immensely entertaining, book shows the Diamond Dagger winner at his best, yet it marks a radical departure from his more conventional detective novels. Here Lovesey chronicles the criminal career of an amoral killer – the page-turning tug is not whodunit but will-he-get-away-with-it. And, to add an extra frisson, the central character with markedly homicidal tendencies is an Anglican rector, improbably named Otis Joy.
When the book opens, it seems likely that Joy’s criminal career is about to come to an untimely end. His bishop has discovered that Joy has been raiding parish funds and demands his resignation – only to meet the fate that usually befalls those who threaten to expose the likeable, yet utterly ruthless young vicar. The murder is skilfully dressed up as suicide, but complications abound and the threats to Joy’s safety start to multiply. Another killing occurs in previously sleepy Foxford, but for once Joy is not the culprit, and the plot becomes even thicker.
Oddly enough, the idea of a serial-killing rector has been done before – by C.E. Vulliamy in ‘Clerical Error’, a thirties novel that was much praised in its day but is now almost wholly forgotten. But Lovesey sustains his plot with much greater verve than Vulliamy, himself a talented writer, could muster. Quite early in the book, I was wondering just how, in technical terms, the author could contrive to juggle the elements of the story so as to maintain reader interest and retain an element of surprise for 300 pages, when so much is revealed so early. Suffice to say that he does it triumphantly. The result is a book to cherish.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the Harry Delvin Mysteries)
