At the End of His Rope

“At a time when British crime fiction seems tipped toward the noir edge of things, it is a treat to come across a classic puzzle story.” So writes Stephen Miller in his January Magazine review, posted today, of Peter Lovesey’s The Secret Hangman.

The ninth entry in Lovesey’s excellent series featuring Inspector Peter Diamond, an “overweight, middle-aged, and occasionally imperious” copper in Bath, England, Hangman finds our hero still recovering from the murder of his wife, Steph (in Diamond Dust, 2002), as he deals with a secret admirer “who has apparently been following his career for a couple of years” and the shocking hanging of a woman in a public park. The deceased was related to a member of the community choir in which Diamond’s immediate superior participates, so this incident leaps to the top of the priority list. But just when evidence suggests a case of suicide, the dead woman’s ex-husband is found dangling by the neck from a roadway viaduct, and one of Diamond’s investigators “recalls that these hangings are markedly similar to a pair of unexplained deaths just a couple of years earlier, when Diamond was too desolate over his wife’s demise to be paying sufficient attention.”

Miller says that Lovesey takes what could have been an abstruse story, with a persistent and potentially “annoying subplot,” and instead produces a rewarding “throwback to the classic English whodunit, dressed up for the modern age.”

His full review can be found here.