Review: "Against the Grain" by Peter Lovesey

 

Against the Grain by Peter Lovesey Soho Crime, 2024   What is advertised as the final Peter Diamond mystery, Against the Grain, the 22nd entry in the impressive series, is a marvelous send off for the cantankerous but brilliant detective. When Peter’s former deputy, Julie Hargreaves—who quit the Bath CID years earlier after she “wearied of his [Diamond’s] overbearing conduct”—has asked Diamond to visit her for a week at her home in the Somerset Village of Baskerville. Diamond does his best trying to avoid the visit, but he is ultimately convinced it is the right thing to do by his romantic partner, Paloma. When Diamond and Paloma arrive, they find that Julie has been blinded by macular degeneration. A condition she kept secret from Diamond when they worked together and may have been the true reason she left Bath. Julie is content with her life, but she has a request of Diamond. Claudia Priest, the heiress of a local dairy farm and Baskerville’s primary employer, was convicted to three years’ incarceration for manslaughter when a party game went horribly wrong. A former lover and then-hanger-on of Claudia’s, Roger Miller, was trapped and crushed to death in a grain silo while trying to recover a garter that would win him the favors of Claudia for the evening. Claudia, without much fuss, was convicted of negligent manslaughter, but Julie believes Claudia was treated unfairly during the trial and she asks Diamond to do his own investigation—off the books, of course—to determine if Claudia is truly guilty. A request Diamond jumps at since it will be his first village mystery, and he would like to test himself as an amateur sleuth against the likes of Miss Marple. Against the Grain is a smart fair-play traditional mystery in the style of the golden age of detection. Diamond is his usual stubborn, at times affable, at times irascible, and always genius self. His interactions with the locals—a laconic and moody teenager named Hamish, the local busy body, a talkative barmaid—are often uncomfortable and always funny. Diamond takes a few wild swings at investigating—he plays at being Columbo and then Poirot—but as the tale winds down he finds his detecting mojo and unravels the mystery as only Peter Diamond can do. And that final revelation is as surprising as it is good.

Find Against the Grain on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.