Peter Lovesey: 44 books

Fired from the police for insubordination, Peter Diamond is reduced to working as a security guard at Harrod's. There he finds an abandoned Japanese girl after the store closes. He must identify her in order to save her life.

On Lansdown Hill, near Bath, a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers that took place over 350 years ago is annually reenacted. Two of the reenactors discover a skeleton that is female, headless, and only about twenty years old. One of them, a professor who played a Cavalier, is later found murdered....

“Exquisitely intricate.” —The New York Times Book Review A skeletal hand is unearthed in the vault under the Pump Room in Bath, England, near the site where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Then a skull is excavated. The bones came from different corpses, and one is modern. Detective...

“Absolutely riveting . . . A masterpiece. I defy anyone to foresee the outcome.”—Ruth Rendell The year is 1921. A passionate affair between voracious romance reader Alma Webster and her dentist, Walter Baranov, has led to his wife’s murder. The lovers take flight aboard the Mauretania...

“At once charming, chilling and convincing as if it had unfolded in the Police Intelligence column of April, 1888.” —TIME London, 1888. Though the beautiful Miriam Cromer has confessed to the murder of her husband’s assistant, she is still confident of her acquittal. But then she is...

"Fine picture of period vice, good mystery plotting, and fun.” —San Francisco Chronicle A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of...

The first entry of the Bertie Prince of Wales mystery series, featuring future King Edward VII, Albert Edward, as an amateur sleuth solving suspicious murders in Victorian England. Bertie, Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, is a charismatic but self-indulgent man who enjoys the finer...

“A rich and unusual mystery, with suspense enough for the most confirmed addict.” —Los Angeles Times Pugilism, a brutal form of bare-knuckle boxing, is forbidden by law in late Victorian England, but Sergeant Cribb discovers evidence that it continues in secret, finding a corpse whose...

“One of the best of this series . . . Lively and well-plotted.” —The New York Times Book Review The spiritualist movement has captivated a segment of Victorian London: manifestations, the occult, and “sensitives” are in vogue. When séance sites become targets for theft, Sergeant...

The second entry of the Bertie Prince of Wales mystery series, featuring future King Edward VII, Albert Edward, as an amateur sleuth solving suspicious murders in Victorian England. Bertie, Prince of Wales, is delighted to be invited by Lady Amelia, a recently widowed young woman, to Desborough...

“Here’s charm and delight. A puzzle postlude to Three Men in a Boat.” **—**The Times London, 1889: After Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat became a Victorian bestseller, rowing on the Thames was the great craze of 1889. When an elementary school teacher in training takes a midnight...

Rudolf Hess was the most closely guarded prisoner in the world. Forty-five years after his capture in Scotland on a supposed peace mission he was still in Spandau Prison. Why was it necessary to keep him there so long? He was a Nazi -- but one with a damaging tale to tell. If anyone can reach...

“[A] vivid postwar environment that confers plausibility, ingenious plot twists that heighten the suspense and two stunning character studies that confound our facile presumptions about women who kill.” —The New York Times Book Review Rose and Antonia were WAAF plotters during World War...

“Bracing psychological suspense.”—The New York Times Book Review Reading, England, 1964. Theo, a lonely university lecturer, is approached by an American girl named Alice who wants to learn more about her father, a GI hanged for murder in Somerset during World War II. As a boy, Theo was...