The Vault by
Peter Lovesey
hbk out January 99
Published by Little Brown
at £16.99
The appearance of a new novel by Peter Lovesey is always a cause for
celebration and the latest case for Bath policeman Peter Diamond more than fulfils one's high expectations. It opens with the discovery of a severed hand in a vault at the Abbey Churchyard in Bath. Diamond is not
over-excited; to find old bones in a burial ground is hardly surprising. But he has not bargained for the media interest which erupts when it emerges that the vault once formed part of the building in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Joe Dougan, an American tourist obsessed with Shelley's masterpiece, stumbles into the investigation when his wife mysteriously disappears. Soon the body of a woman is washed up in the River Avon - but the victim is not Donna Dougan.
Lovesey has constructed an agreeably complicated and entertaining mystery, with two neatly interlocking criminal plots. The Shelley material is handled with great assurance and, as usual, the Bath setting is stylishly evoked. The killer's motive and alibi seemed to me to be rather on the thin side, but in the overall scale of things this is a minor criticism. Although Lovesey came comparatively late to the contemporary murder mystery, he has proved in the Diamond books that he is a master of it. This is a novel which is sheer pleasure to read.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
The Vault by
Peter Lovesey