This is what can happen when a top cop's son plans to marry an influential criminal's daughter. Peter Diamond was to keep an eye on the convict while he attended the wedding in case one of his enemies tried to bump him off but it turned out that the murder victim was someone else. Lovesey writes a good police procedural and Diamond is always worth a few good lines.

The bride's cat was named Claude, an appropriate feline name even though he kept his claws sheathed. ( )

Always happy to settle in with Peter Diamond. Don't let the jacket copy fool you - it makes it sound uneasily "cosy," what with a fancy wedding and cutesy bridesmaids and such. But it isn't - it's solid Lovesey. Diamond is reliably grumpy, smart, and irritable. Not sure what has become of Paloma, his sometime lover, but there's a staunch, courageous, animal-loving prison official who seems like she should appeal to Diamond... we'll see. There's a lengthy (maybe just a bit too lengthy) buildup to the wedding, where a big-league crime boss is being protected from an anticipated hit. We see the intricacies of security concerns and precautions, and a "Day of the Jackal"-sort of following of the hitman's preparations. Just as we relax a little, Lovesey drops a neatly done twist when a corpse is found in the venue. All well and good, but my main beef with this one is: Lovesey cheats. I had my eye on a particular suspect very early on, but couldn't quite figure out the rationale. Towards the end, Lovesey is given a piece of evidence to examine, and "Two hours later, he knew who had fired that gun." But Lovesey withholds that evidence from us, so we are left behind Diamond, who gets to explain it all in the customary "Reveal" at the end. No fair! I was right about the who, but if Lovesey hides evidence from us, we are at a disadvantage. So - subtract a star. Is Lovesey getting bored or lazy after 18 Peter Diamonds? Hope not. ( )

I absolutely love Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond mysteries. To change things up this time I listened to this one on audible. I think I still prefer to read these books because I found that I missed some of the sly innuendos and puns that are always sprinkled throughout every book Lovesey writes. But even so, it was fun to hear the book, and the narrator, Simon Prebble, did an awesome job with all the voices. For those of you who have not read Peter Diamond, I highly recommend the series. They are certainly not your run-of-the-mill, everyday type of mystery. They are fresh, funny and very tricky. I never seem to figure out the perpetrator until the very end. And DCI Peter Diamond is an absolute delight and a wonderful character. In this book Diamond is asked to act as security for a wedding between the Chief Constable's son and a notorious crime boss's daughter. Totally out of his element at a high society wedding. Peter manages to keep everything going smoothly for the wedding. But in the background we hear about a plot to kill a wedding guest. It's a game of cat and mouse, but due to extenuating circumstances such as a rain storm, the wedding guests all remain safe. When a body is found it appears to be suicide, Diamond knows that it is murder, and that he is up against a particularly clever killer. Do not be fooled by Diamond's bumbling exterior. Inside his considerable bulk lies a very sharp brain indeed. Over and over again, he proves that old-fashioned policing and common-sense are still the best way. If you decide to take on this series, start with Book 1 - The Last Detective. I wish they'd serialize these books for television. ( )

Peter Lovesey must be among our most prolific crime novelists, publishing a novel every year since the 1970s. In addition to a number of stand-alone books, his copious output has included three series of novels. The first of these featured the lugubrious Sergeant Cribb (‘of the Detective), who, with his even more lugubrious sidekick, Constable Thackeray, investigated a sequence of crimes in Victorian London. These were followed by a handful of books in which ‘Bertie’, the cheery pre-succession incarnation of the later King Edward VII, encountered, and eventually solved, various crimes. These were fairly successful, and the Cribb books subsequently made their way onto television during the early 1980s.;

His greatest success, however, came in the 1990s when he introduced his most-enduring character, the querulous Superintendent Peter Diamond, who heads the Homicide Division in Bath. Given the photogenic nature of Bath, I am rather surprised that the Diamond novels have not also made their way onto television. The combination of glorious setting, soundly constructed plots and idiosyncratic protagonist might have been expected to make an eminently exportable television series, reprising the Morse/Lewis/Endeavour effect seen in Oxford. Perhaps it is simply down to the authorities in Bath who might feel that the city’s roads are already so heavily congested that the disruption arising from blockages for filming, and the consequential increase in tourism are not to be borne.

This latest book is the eighteenth novel featuring Peter Diamond, and sees him roped in, against his better judgement, to supervise the security arrangements when the Deputy Chief Constable’s son marries the daughter of the gangland boss, only recently released from a lengthy prison sentence, who had masterminded much of the city’s crime. All rather implausible, of course, but once the reader makes the initial suspension of disbelief, the novel follows on fairly smoothly.

To be fair, this is not one of Lovesey’s better novels, and I suspect that anyone who first encounters the series through this book is unlikely to be inspired to look back at some of its predecessors. They would lose out, because several of the earlier novels, and [Bloodhounds] and [The Stone Wife] in particular, are very good. ( )

Filled with surprising plot twists, illuminated with tense, well-written scenes between interesting but easy-to-relate-to people and set against a Bath I know well, "Killing With Confetti" was excellent entertainment.


I only discovered Peter Lovesey's series about Bath-based police detective Peter Diamond last year. For once, I didn't go back to the beginning but dived it at book seventeen in the series, "Beau Death" because I couldn't resist the premise of a long-dead body, dressed as Beau Nash, being found as a building is demolished.



I had such a good time with that, that I bought book eighteen, "Killing With Confetti", as soon as it came out.


It was also an entertaining read, although quite different from the previous book. It opens with a set of scenes about a prison riot and a related abduction. Peter Diamond was nowhere to be seen, but I didn't miss him because I rapidly became absorbed in what was happening in the prison. The scenes were tense, laced with a little humour and kept me turning the pages by going places I didn't expect.


When we do get to Peter Diamond there is no obvious link to the start of the book. Peter has been dragooned by the Deputy Chief Constable to provide personal protection to the father of the woman the DCC's son is getting married to, a local and much-feared crime boss who has just been released from prison.


In the story that follows, we get an close-up look at how posh weddings in Bath are staged (Ceremony at the Abbey and reception at private suite in the Roman Baths), follow an assassin planning and executing a hit, meet a truly scary hard man and watch Peter Diamond deal effortlessly with politicking senior officers but struggle when faced with tiny-but-wild bridesmaids and their not-so-tiny-but-really-wanting-to-be-wild mothers.


I enjoyed the mix of tension and humour in the storytelling. It kept things human without taking away a sense of threat. The details of Bath were spot on. I now know exactly how to plan to execute someone at a wedding in the Abbey and get away with it. I doubt that's knowledge I'll use but it was amusing to see such dramatic events worked out in my town.


The ending tugged hard on my suspension of disbelief but never actually snapped it. I'll be back for more Peter Diamond next year. I may even drop back in time and read some of the earlier books.


Peter Wickham does an excellent job as the narrator. You can hear a sample of his work by clicking on the SoundCloud link below.

https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudiouk/killing-with-confetti-by-peter-lovesey-re...
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