Peter Diamond takes a dive down among the dead men to solve a seven-year-old murder case in the latest installment of Peter Lovesey's classic procedural series.In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a posh private girls' school disappears without explanation. None of her students miss her boring lessons, especially since her replacement is a devilishly hunky male teacher with a fancy car. But then her name shows up on a police missing persons list. What happened to Miss Gibbon, and why does no one seem to care?Meanwhile, detective Peter Diamond finds himself in Sussex, much against his wishes. His irritating and often obtuse supervisor, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore, has made Diamond accompany her on a Home Office internal investigation. A Sussex detective has been suspended for failing to link DNA evidence of a relative to a seven-year-old murdercase--a bad breach of ethics. Diamond is less than...

Rose and Antonia had a good war. As WAAF plotters, they had all the excitement and independence of a difficult and dangerous job, and all the fun of being two women on an RAF base.Peacetime is a disappointment. There is rationing, shortages, and nothing to do. Rosie's war-hero husband has turned into a brutal lout: Antonia, bored with her rich manufacturer, wants to move to America with her lover. Neither can afford a divorce. But what are plotters for, if not to plot? And Antonia's ruthless scheme would give them both what they want.If Rosie doesn't lose her nerve, they could get away with murder ...

'You must understand that we are not dealing with petty thieves or one of your backyard murderers, Cribb. We are fighting a secret society pledged to wrench Ireland from Her Majesty's dominion by every means at its disposal.' The year is 1884. London is being terrorised by a series of bomb blasts - even within Great Scotland Yard! Reluctantly, Sergeant Cribb attends a course in the science of infernal machines in a bid to gain expert knowledge of explosives and beat the criminals at their own game. With Constable Thackeray the prime suspect, Cribb feels bound for professional and personal reasons to track down the truth at any cost. And very soon he is abducted at gunpoint by an Irish-American hammer-thrower and finds himself an unwilling but vital member of the Dynamite Party...

"A consummate storyteller." – Colin Dexter With another court case over and a local villain banged up for a few years, Detective Inspector Peter Diamond is keen to get his teeth into another case. So when a call comes in that a woman's body has been found in one of Bath's parks he gets himself to the scene in record time, where he is able to identify the victim as his wife and to establish the fact she's been shot. Mad with grief, Diamond eventually concedes he cannot be an unbiased member of the investigation. Keeping himself away from the team becomes all the harder when he suddenly finds himself under suspicion, and when his colleagues find no case against him but appear unwilling to follow up any of his suggestions – did Steph's previous husband have an alibi – Diamond decides that a little independent action is called for. As well as following his theory that a family of local thugs killed Steph to get at him, he is also intrigued by the fact that the wife of another policeman has gone missing. He'd served with the husband in the Met and they revisit the cases they'd worked on together. Between them they unearth many startling possibilities and some unexpected facts, but it is Diamond who ultimately avenges his beloved wife.

Jo and Gemma are friends who meet for coffee every Saturday to gossip and discuss the state of the world. At one such meeting, Gemma mentions killing her boss and Jo goes along with the joke. But Jo is not amused when she finds a real body on the beach at Selsey soon afterwards - an unidentified nearly-naked woman, who has been drowned. It take DCI Hen Mallin and her team some time to discover who the woman is, and as they are investigating, Jo and Gemma are getting into more trouble - they keep coming across dead bodies…Peter Lovesey’s thirtieth novel explores one of his favourite themes - the innocent caught up in sinister events. His previous Hen Mallin book, The Circle, was described by Gerald Kaufman in The Scotsman as ‘this gem of a book … the superb Peter Lovesey provides yet another novel of unalloyed delight.’Review'Lovesey's writing is lucid and succinct, and he is a consumate story-teller.' Colin Dexter 'No-one has done this kind of thing better since Dorothy L. Sayers ... A must for crime buffs.' Mail on Sunday About the AuthorPeter 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 in 1991-2. He has just won the Short Story Dagger for 2007. He lives in Chichester.

This is "Peter Lovesey's Short List" of his best ever short stories, including the Crime Writers' Association's best short story of 2007, "Needle Match", and featuring some of his most popular detectives - Bertie, Prince of Wales, Sergeant Cribb and Rosemary and Thyme. Surprises are guaranteed, as elephants appear in a London side street; a gang of geriatrics goes on a hearing aid heist and an underworld boss searches for a harp. Join the author in a brush with Adolf Hitler and take a walk on Beachy Head, the UK's favourite suicide spot...

"This entertaining period mystery, set in Victorian England, is lively, lurid, amusing."--Publishers Weekly "These are humorous novels and the humour is character-based . . . mixed with the absurdities of the English class-system. . . . Cribb was the first of the new-wave Victorian crime-fighters and is arguably still the best."--Sherlock Holmes Magazine The second Sergeant Cribb mystery is set in the world of Victorian bare-fisted pugilism--an illegal sport. Constable Jago is sent, undercover, to Radstock Hall by Sergeant Cribb, who suspects that when fighters who train there lose, they are murdered.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"A wickedly clever writer." – Ruth Rendell Clarion Calhoun is a fading pop star wanting to launch an acting career. The audience at her debut on stage at Bath's Theatre Royal are expecting a dramatic evening – but what they get is beyond their wildest imagination. When Clarion is rushed to hospital with third degree burns, rumours spread through the theatrical community and beyond. In the best theatrical tradition, the show goes on, but the agony turns to murder. The case falls to Peter Diamond, Bath's top detective – but for reasons he can't understand, he suffers a physical reaction amounting to phobia each time he goes near the theatre. As he tries to find its root in his past, the tension at the Theatre Royal mounts, legends come to life and the killer strikes again…