Beau Death

Beau Death brings Peter Diamond a skeleton found in a Bath attic during demolition, dressed in authentic 1760s clothing and wearing a white tricorn hat that suggests it might belong to Beau Nash, one of Bath's most famous historical figures. As Diamond begins to fantasize about overturning two centuries of Nash scholarship, one of his constables starts producing evidence that complicates the theory, and the investigation becomes as much about Diamond's relationship with certainty as about any particular crime.

Steven Crossley narrates the Peter Diamond series with a Bath-specific authority that fits the local procedural format. His performance gives Diamond's intellectual stubbornness a dry humor, and the historical subplot, which requires Crossley to carry eighteenth-century Bath alongside the contemporary investigation, is handled with the right tonal distinction.