Book Review of Showstopper by Peter Lovesey

SHOWSTOPPER by Peter Lovesey is what I call a quicker picker upper mystery. I happened on it on the new book shelf at the library and because it was short, about show business, and set in my favorite locale (Britain), I took a gamble.

Peter Diamond is a detective in the historic town of Bath. He is having his own age-related emotional problems and when his superior orders him to stop mucking about in a popular TV show’s remarkable run of bad luck and instead order his team to start taking courses in more modern detection methods, he interprets this an attempt to force his own retirement.

Then, in a stroke of luck, the media find legs in a story about the TV shows string of accidents, disappearances, and deaths.  Diamond’s boss is now convinced that if this is a big story, her department has to solve the mystery in order keep the public happy with the police department. In a flash Diamond has encouragement from the top and a big budget to either prove that all the problems were accidental or to find and arrest a serial executioner who is running amuck.    

The bad luck angle is quickly discarded and it begins to appear more likely that someone has a dangerous grudge against the show or the personnel involved in making it. While his team researches backgrounds, Diamond carries out suspect interviews with the current star, her stunt double, the producer, the director, and an assortment of gaffers, grips, and production assistants. While the entertainment industry characters are pretty common stereotypes, there is also a strange itinerant tramp who has managed to be in Bath every time nasty incidents have occurred. He is by far the most interesting character when placed against the uppity star, the super organized director with a strange home life, the talented writer who can’t refuse a drink, and an assortment of disgruntled former employees and current worker bees. The prose is competent, but rather sparse on color and atmosphere in my estimation. The setting in the historic town of Bath seems to get a shorter shrift than it deserves.

On the positive side there is some humor. One of the nicest bits is the desperate search by divers at a river marina for evidence of human remains that finds everything but.  And you can safely recommend the book to your grandmother. It is well within the “cozy" mystery” genre. The twists and turns at the end show why Mr. Lovesey is a pretty fair plot creator, but I balk at a book jacket flack calling him one of the “finest exponents of golden age fiction.”   Give it 2.5 stars and choose only if Louise Penny or Elizabeth George are not available.