Another One Goes Tonight by Peter Lovesey

Another One Goes Tonight
by Peter Lovesey
Pages: 401
Date: July 5 2016
Publisher: Soho Crime
Series: Peter Diamond (16th in series)

Review Rating: 5.5 out of 5.0
Read: July 17 to 18 2016


This is my 34th book by Lovesey, 16th in the Peter Diamond series. Actually, 35th book, I forgot that I read 1 book by Lovesey under another name. Though I forget, at the moment, the specific name. Peter Lear, I think.

Other than random short stories floating around in places I cannot reach, a couple, I think, of Lear books I do not have access to, and 2 books in one of Lovesey's series, I've read everything by this author.

I have not always loved everything I've read, and, for the most part, I'd say that he is a damned good writer. Barring a few exceptions here and there. The only book by him that I've rated as low as 2 stars is the first book in his 'Albert Edward Prince of Wales' series - which leads directly to the reason as to why I haven't read the two other books in that series. And, other than that 2 star book, this book here (which I gave 5.5 stars to), the book 'On the Edge' (3 stars), and the Lear book (another 3 star book), everything I've read by Lovesey I've given 4 stars to. Well, some rest on a 4.5 shelf and the like, and some might have been closer to being 3.8 books, but none of that matters here at Goodreads, not when we do not have half stars and the like, so 31 books rated, by Goodreads standards, 4 stars.

Doesn't really take much thinking to understand how happy I am when I happen to notice a new book appear by Lovesey.

Lovesey's something of an odd one when it comes to plot lines and characters. He has had killers as the main character, and murder suspects, and one or several that involve the point of view of an amateur doing some deducting, while one of his series regulars works on the case from another direction. Even when you think of series, there are oddities - like you do not expect a police series to start off with the main character in the police, then - for various reasons, he suddenly isn't in the police any longer and is a P.I. (or working security, I've forgotten now what jobs he had during his break), then back to being a police person.

I mention all that, the odd little things that turn up, because that occurs in this book as well. This is both not a straight forward murder mystery, while at the same time it is a book about a serial killer (that part isn't a spoiler, the serial killer part, because the reader has snippets from the killer's journal at various points of the novel).

It is not a straight forward murder mystery, because no one actually realizes that there are any murders to investigate. For, you see, Peter Diamond has been tasked by his boss to work as the local professional standards guy to investigate a motor vehicle crash. That's right; one of the top homicide detectives has been tasked to be something like a crime scene investigator for a motor vehicle accident, specifically tasked with the assignment to determine if the people in the vehicle handled themselves in a professional manner . . . or something like that. The police are looking into that because the car that crashed was a police car. And, when Diamond gets the assignment, there is one dead police officer, and one severally injured one.

So, Diamond and two of his underlings investigate. Diamond arrives at the accident scene about 45 minutes or so after getting the assignment, which was about 3 hours after the accident occurred. Which I mention because Diamond spots something no one else spotted in the 3 hours that the scene had been investigated – he finds that another vehicle had been involved in the accident and that there was an unconscious, possibly dead body up in the bushes (I have it perfectly outlined in my mind the scene, and bushes isn’t correct, let me see – the body was up a hill in some vegetation and hard to spot without being up the hill).

I mention all that because the book focuses directly on the person who was found, and the possible activities that individual might have been involved in. Activities, based on various objects and papers found, that might involve murder – murder of various people whose deaths had been declared natural or accidental (mostly natural – old people dying in their sleep). But were they actually natural deaths, or is there a serial killer on the loose?

A quite interesting book. Quite enjoyable read.

July 20 2016