Gain Cop To Corpse (Peter Diamond, #12) Engineered By Peter Lovesey Rendered As Print

Peter Diamond on the case of a serial killer who is picking off bobbies on the beat, Three in three nearby towns in the space of three months, Very good police procedural. Turf battles and red herrings, A police procedural in a long running series, set in the city of Bath and the surrounding area, Peter Diamond is a Chief Superintendent in CID, the plain clothes police department, and is called in to assist when the third uniformed officer in a row is shot by a sniper.
The others were killed in nearby towns but this time the victim is killed in Bath while on the beat foot patrol,

There are some good aspects such as the wry humour of a Chief Superintendent who gets car sick during car chases, and some of the banter between the police characters, but other aspects struck me as unconvincing.
This included the hostility of Diamond's team to the possibility that it is an inside job that the murders are connected and that either a police person or a civilian working at a police station is involved.
Diamond seems to blunder from one mishap to another, including going on stake out in unsuitable clothing, and ending up on crutches after assault by the apparent perpetrator.
Leaving aside the point that someone of his senior rank wouldn't be involved in such handson police work since all police procedural novels and TV shows also ignore this, it's difficult to see how he has managed to keep the respect of his team up to now.
But their hostility is also a bit ridiculous as there are plenty of reallife instances of police who have not measured up to their calling so they should have had the open mindedness to at least consider it even if they were determined to find evidence to prove their boss' theory wrong.


There is also an unexplained until the end of the book and rather boring blog inserted at various points along the way.
A young woman apparently does some amateur sleuthing with two friends into the behaviour of a man who books short trips abroad, The blog hints that another character who is exarmy may be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and could therefore be the sniper responsible for the police deaths.


The actual denouement I found totally unconvincing, I won't say more as it would give too much away, but it seemed far fetched across the board, with the motives of those concerned failing to justify their actions.
Because Cop to Corpse is my first exposure to Peter Loveseys Peter Diamond series, I am certainly no expert on the character or its development over the course of the seriess eleven previous books.
But if the other eleven are as entertaining as this one, this detective series should be investigated by all police procedural fans looking for a new detective to follow.
Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond is far closer to the end of his career than to the beginning, and it shows in his attitude and how he approaches an investigation.
Readers will enjoy watching him play the game his way,

PC Harry Trasker is the third policeman in the Bath area, Diamonds home turf, to be shot dead by a sniper in just a few weeks.
As were the two previous victims, Trasker was killed instantly by a clean shot to the head, indicating that the shooter is a well trained, skillful marksman.
More disturbing, perhaps, is the shooters uncanny ability to commit the murders without ever being seen or leaving behind a trace of evidence the police can use to track him.
This, however, begins to change with the murder of Harry Trasker,

This time someone calls police immediately following the shooting and they arrive on the scene within minutes, something the killer never expected to happen.
When the young policeman in charge at the scene of the crime decides that capturing the killer on his own before backup arrives would be a great career move, things get interesting.
That is when Peter Diamond arrives only to learn that the investigation has already been claimed by a rather pompous rival of his from a neighboring jurisdiction, Chief Superintendent Gull.


Gull, though, will prove to be the least of Diamonds problems because, after Diamond becomes convinced that the shooter might be a fellow cop, he will face a rebellion within the ranks that forces him to investigate that theory on his own.
Despite being left on crutches after a near fatal encounter with a darkly helmeted motorcycle rider, Diamond follows the leads wherever they take him.
Along the way, he suffers the abuse of grieving police widows, a loss of respect from his own investigating team, and the indignity of reporting to the fool officially in charge of the

Somerset Sniper investigation.


Cop to Corpse shows that Peter Lovesey is a crime writer still very much at the top of his game despite having been awardeds Cartier Diamond Dagger for “lifetime achievement in crime writing.
” This book was not up to the level and had some very unbelievable scenarios, As in Peter in the field, And after severe injuries. Nope!
When we realize there arekillers, we are still forced to follow the completely unreasonable red herrings,
.rounded to.
Ill give the next book a chance, because I loved the series so far, Well . I have read all the Peter Diamond's to date and by comparison this is not as good,
It starts like a scene from a TV Police show, All drama and action and never really recovered,

There was much less descriptive text about Bath, which I missed,
Also, some of the previous characters were almost cameo parts only,

The conclusion seemed rushed and was not overly satisfying,

A great shame, but only being honest here,

Read by Simon Prebble
Total Runtime, . .HoursMins

Description: In the small hours of a Sunday morning in the city of Bath a policeman on beat duty is shot dead by an unseen gunman the third killing of an officer in Somerset in a matter of weeks.
The emergency services are summoned, Ambitious to arrest the Somerset Sniper, the duty inspector, Ken Lockton, seals the crime scene, which is confined by the river on one side and a massive retaining wall on the other.
He discovers the murder weapon in a garden and is himself attacked and left for dead, Enter Peter Diamond, Bath's burly CID chief, Middleaged and not built for action, he pits himself and his team against the killer in a hunt that will test his physical powers to the limit.
. .

This is the one with a florist's blog, a Minehead Hobby Horse, the rollercoaster that is Brassknocker Hill, and a tramp throught the dense and spooky Becky Addy wood.






The Last Detective Peter Diamond,
Diamond Solitaire Peter Diamond
The Summons Peter Diamond
Bloodhounds Peter Diamond,
.
Upon A Dark Night Peter DiamondThe Vault Peter Diamond,
Diamond Dust Peter Diamond,The House Sitter Peter Diamond,The Secret Hangman Peter Diamond,
Skeleton Hill Peter Diamond,
Stagestruck Peter Diamond,
CR Cop to Corpse Lovesey's writing is masterful, his plots uniquely complicated and his characters very real.
C to C however was disappointing in that while the quality of writing never wavered and the characters were still very true to form, the reader was sent down some rabbit holes that were too deep for their worthiness in the end.
Especially when my initial suspicions were finally confirmed after much to me anyway pointless meandering, Two thirds of the way through I was still waiting for some opening to crack even slightly,

This was especially maddening since never before have I called out the original perpetrator within the first two chapters in a Diamond story.
A small check back would have saved the detective and the reader hours of complex red herrings, Also a confession: I hate having to slog through a secondary character's narrative in a book, I seem to resent the need to give my attention to another while the first narration is suspended, It's an irritating distraction I suppose as I find it enough of a task to attend to the main action line,

Further I think Lovesey mistakes a Blog for an actual writer's venue, This supposed Blog was so unbelievably unrealistic, so detailed and literate that it simply wasn't credible, Most Blogs are "Glogs" as we say here, . . just a load of rubbishy whinging with absolutely no literary merit whatsoever, let alone clue dropping, This so obviously was A Blogge, as an accomplished novelist would imagine someone might create, And so the conceit clanged a great deal,

Ah well, Lovesey is allowed one or two missteps in this otherwise impressive series even as he deservedly reveals the dangers of nationalist movements and exploitive bogus immigration scams with mixed results.
Does not dissuade me from his other work, .