Bloodhounds

Bloodhounds, the fourth Peter Diamond novel, begins when a rare penny black stamp and a corpse turn up in Bath within hours of each other. Both are connected to a group of mystery-reader enthusiasts called the Bloodhounds, who urge Diamond to find the killer. The locked-room element, a body inside a padlocked houseboat with the only key on an otherwise absent suspect, is one of Lovesey's most elegant formal puzzles.

Michael Healy narrates with a Bath-inflected confidence that suits both Lovesey's setting and the book-within-a-book quality of a mystery involving devoted readers of the genre. The CWA Silver Dagger-winning novel benefits from narration that finds the comic texture in Diamond's relationship with the Bloodhounds without undercutting the genuine mystery underneath.