‘The Finisher’ by Peter Lovesey

THIS IS A GRAND STORY of old-school police procedural proportions, a murder mystery which employs the same dedication and precision as the runners in training for the Bath Half Marathon. The build-up is firm and steady, the plot delivers survival tactics, and every likely and unlikely event is taken into consideration.

MOST OF THE GROUNDING for this solid piece of deduction has to do with Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of Bath’s Criminal Investigations Department. I can’t say Diamond is all that loveable, and he gets himself into trouble on the odd occasion, but he’s a great character to drape a story around.

DIAMOND HAS A GIRLFRIEND Paloma and when they are together I get a midsomer murder ‘Shakespeare and Hathaway’ vibe. Diamond is aided and abetted by two sensible police officers, Keith Halliwell and Ingeborg Smith, and annoyed by Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore. Like any good whodunnit, there’s a crusty forensic pathologist Dr Sealy and a number of important characters woven into the story.

Bath Half Marathon August 2020 03 — Do you think you could run this marathon? https://bathhalf.co.uk/race-info/

I AM NOT BIG on writing synopses because I figure that a potential reader can get any amount of reviews online which offer insights into this ingenious plot. Suffice to say that the Bath Half Marathon is an absolutely huge running event held in UK and literally thousands of people from all walks of life compete each year for charity. On this occasion, a murder takes place and Diamond has to find the body before he can make an arrest. Actually there are two murders but this is where it gets tricky…

AUTHOR PETER LOVESEY has given the reader several suspects to choose from and they are all plausible. Some of the characters include Spiro and Murat part of the modern-day slave trade, Maeve Kelly primary school teacher, sleazy Tony Pinto, and wife of Russian oligarch Olga Ivanova, taking part in the Bath Half Marathon for wildly different reasons.

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I HAD A MASSIVE claustrophobia attack: the hills where the race is run has hundreds of old tunnels and underground quarries. I haven’t felt that bad since I read ‘The Chalk Pit’ a Ruth Galloway mystery by Elly Griffiths. Cruelly, Lovesey did not spare my nerves.

THE BOOK TITLE is apt in various ways, and apart from showcasing beautiful Bath, there are techie things like micro-chipped runners and aerial drones. However, Lovesey does say that the route he mapped out is not the one followed by real runners. He has never run the marathon but as an author and sports writer he cleverly captures the mood and excitement of the event.

Nothing like running a hot bath after running the Bath Half Marathon.

I MAY NOT SAY ‘Where are my running shoes?’ but with at least seventeen other novels in the Peter Diamond series, I am going to start my own reading marathon.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

AUTHOR PROFILE

Peter (Harmer) Lovesey (born 1936), also known by his pen name Peter Lear, is a British writer of historical and contemporary detective novels and short stories. His best-known series characters are Sergeant Daniel Cribb, a Victorian-era police detective based in London, and Peter Diamond, a modern-day police detective in Bath.

Peter Lovesey lives near Chichester UK and was a teacher/lecturer before he turned to full-time writing. In 2020 he celebrates 50 years as an author and ironically in 1970 his first prize-winning novel was ‘Wobble to Death’ where a bizarre six-day endurance race takes place in 1880s London. His son Phil Lovesey also writes crime novels.

Favourite School Story – Helen Hollick on Ruby Ferguson’s Jill Series

After reading two of Debbie Young’s Sophie Sayers mystery novels out of order, I decided to savour the series and start from the beginning with ‘Best Murder in Show’. Debbie also writes St Brides, a British girls’ boarding school series for grown-ups, and in that vein she has interviewed award-winning historical and fantasy novelist Helen Hollick about her favourite childhood books.

Please read on…. ♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Debbie Young's Writing Life

The fourth in my occasional series of interviews with author friends who love school stories

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24 Stories: of Hope for Survivors of the Grenfell Tower Fire

My emotions overcame me when I read this piece…read for yourself…

Book Jotter

by Kathy Burke (Editor)

My routine was much as usual on the morning of Wednesday 14th June 2017: I arose early for work, fed the chickens, settled myself at the kitchen table for my first cuppa of the day and switched the TV on to watch BBC News.

For several seconds I stared vacantly at the screen, unable to comprehend the shocking nature of the images I was seeing. There was a man sobbing incoherently to a reporter and then emergency services vehicles were shown illuminating huddles of grim-faced onlookers in their flickering lights. It began to make sense when the picture jumped to a high-rise block of flats of the sort you find in cities throughout the UK, except this one had taken on the appearance of an immense Chinese lantern burning uncontrollably over a sleeping city.

This was Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey Brutalist-style construct in North Kensington…

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

Father Brown 02

Quote from G. K. Chesterton who was an early 20th century British writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, art and literary critic and biographer. Apart from many literary works, Chesterton is well known for his book series of Catholic priest-detective Father Brown. These books were produced for television by BBC One with Mark Williams in the lead role.

Here is a small selection of Chesterton novels:

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
The Ball and the Cross (1910)
Man Alive (1912)
The Flying Inn (1914)
The Return of Don Quixote (1927)

Chesterton once said “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

‘Breakfast With The Borgias’ by DBC Pierre

Bookcover DBC Pierre 03 — Author interview March 2011 http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-dbc-pierre/

Correct thinking and clear vision are applied to wunderkind Ariel Panek, a computer scientist and associate professor but he is powerless when heavy fog sees him stranded overnight in the rambling, dilapidated Cliffs Hotel on the Suffolk coast. Without connectivity, Ariel is tormented by the “no network” signal because he is overdue to talk at a conference in Geneva where he will meet his undergraduate girlfriend Zeva Neely.

Meanwhile the odd hotel staff and weird guests are making Ariel feel uncomfortable. A bizarre set of circumstances conspire to prevent him leaving the hotel. He must fend off unwanted attention, cut through the Borgia family secrets and subterfuge, and try to battle his way back to normality.

Reclusive, modernist Booker prize-winning author DBC Pierre has loaded this eerie Hammer Films-inspired novella with his trademark blend of social, scientific and spiritual matters. Gradually the layers are peeled back to reveal the chilling truth behind this unsettling tale.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Reviewer Notes:
1. The woman in the story who shares my first name is definitely not me!
2. If you are reading this, Peter, I’d love you to autograph my copy of the above.
3. My review of “Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It” by DBC Pierre.
4. Synopsis quotation: “You can be insecure and be a writer. You can be unsuccessful and be a writer. You can be a bad person and be a writer … You just have to write. That’s where it gets tricky”.