The Circle

by Peter Lovesey

Published 3 February 2005
Encouraged by his fourteen-year-old-daughter who recognises his lonely widowhood, Bob Naylor decides to join a writers' circle, believing he might gain some expert help with the poetry which keeps spilling out of his imagination. He discovers a motley collection of wannabe authors who he doubts he has anything in common with, but just as he is deciding not to formally join the group he learns that a publisher who addressed their last meeting has been killed and he stays to see what might develop. The Senior Investigating Officer, Henrietta Mallin, soon has all the members of the group under suspicion and under pressure from her superiors arrests their Chairman. Bob, the only writer who had not met the dead man, is persuaded by some other members of the group to do some investigating of his own. And that is when the trouble really starts, because another death turns the spotlight of suspicion on to him.

Rough Cider

by Peter Lovesey

Published 1 January 1900
“Bracing psychological suspense.”The New York Times Book Review

Reading, England, 1964. Theo, a lonely university lecturer, is approached by an American girl named Alice who wants to learn more about her father, a GI hanged for murder in Somerset during World War II. As a boy, Theo was a principal witness for the prosecution. He has been haunted by the arrest and conviction ever since. As the pair tries to uncover the facts, the horrors of the past take on a frightening immediacy when another murder is committed.

Bloodhounds

by Peter Lovesey

Published 2 May 1996

The fourth uniquely stylish crime novel, from the award-winning Peter Diamond series.

'Darling, if ever I've met a group of potential murderers anywhere, it's the Bloodhounds.' Thus says one of the members of the Bloodhounds of Bath, a society that meets in a crypt to discuss crime novels. But to their latest recruit, they seem just a gaggle of dotty misfits, until one of them reveals that he is in possession of an immensely valuable stamp, recently stolen from the Postal Museum.

Then theft is overtaken by murder when the corpse of one of the Bloodhounds is found in a locked houseboat, with the only key in the possession of a man with a perfect alibi. Burly Peter Diamond finds himself embroiled in a mystery evoking the classic crime puzzles of John Dickson Carr.

Winner of the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger, the Barry Award and the Macavity Award.