National Network for Equitable Library Service

Bath police detective Peter Diamond suffers no fools. Now his nightmare has come to pass: he has to collaborate with the most preposterous kind of fool he can imagine. The self-styled Johnny Getz (his business card proclaims he "Getz Results!") is a private investigator who has been hired to track down Septimus "Seppy" Hubbard, a missing antiques dealer whose case Diamond has been assigned by the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad. Johnny Getz is a Philip Marlowe wannabe, complete with ridiculous private eye duds and a frustratingly high (and inaccurate) opinion of his detection skills. But is Getz's real job to find a missing victim or to stymie Diamond's progress? In this celebration of the mystery genre's greatest practitioners and most outrageous heroes, Peter Lovesey delivers another perfect Golden Age-style puzzle mystery, rippling with unforgettable one-liners and slapstick adventure, and sparkling with brilliantly drawn secondary characters.