First published 1992. Sphere paperback, 2014, pp 388, c. 94,000 words.
This is a detective story concerning the mystery of the appearance of a mute child. That plot line is interleaved with an apparently unrelated tale of a pharmaceutical company. The main protagonist eventually emerges as a former policeman, Peter Diamond, who is intrigued by the child and has time on his hands to try to find out who she is and why she was apparently abandoned.
Mostly this is a cracking read; a page-turner in the Jeffrey Archer style. The plot and characters are so full of holes that they might be used targets from a shooting range. Would the London police send a thirty-person armed team as a first response to an intruder alarm going off in Harrods department store [p3]? Would a famous sports star really hand over his gold-card details to a man he had barely met and whose language he didn’t speak [p161]? Would a woman in charge of mentally disturbed children hand over one of them to someone calling herself the child’s mother without some checking up [p166]? Would a highly experienced detective be so obviously fooled into getting into a stranger’s car. [p283] Would New York detectives do anything but lock up such a bumbling character? Could a fat and clumsy man race up a couple of flights of stairs? [p249] Surely a British former policeman would know in the 1990s what an American policeman means by ‘a piece’ [p314]? Wouldn’t a foreigner be asked to remove his shoes when entering a traditional Japanese building [p351]?
Occasionally the pace goes off the boil as the writing gets bogged down with a dump of the author’s research. Yes, yes, we can see that you have read extensively on the subject of an autism diagnosis [p84 et al]; now get on with the action, and also about Alzheimer’s drugs [p310 et al]; now get back to the action.
The interleaved stories are irritating, and a whole load of loose ends are left unresolved. A story line is just getting going when it is put aside and another is brought forward for a bit. The narrative does eventually focus on the detective racing around doing his work, and there are some excellent set pieces, well described locations and secondary characters; the defensive and unpleasant Mrs Straw is a fine example [p172]. Some are more caricatures – Italian mafiosi: oh dear, and they are not even any good at finishing critical people off (like James Bond baddies.)
Despite all that, this is mostly a competently written, pacy highly entertaining piece of detective hokum. Just remember to leave you’re critical faculties outside when reading.
Wikipedia biography of Lovesey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lovesey
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214617.Diamond_Solitaire?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16
© William John Graham, December 2023