Peter Lovesey, where have you been all my life? I just met you in book 16 of your series starring the curmudgeonly Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, the head of CID.

In ANOTHER ONE GOES TONIGHT, Diamond uses CPR to save the life of an elderly man he finds in a ditch while investigating a one-car accident that fatally injures one policeman and leaves his partner in critical condition. Were the two incidents connected? The police department wants to exonerate the officers of any wrongdoing, and Diamond is appointed, much to his disgruntlement, to find evidence to clear the officers. He should be out solving murders, not playing cleanup to a potential departmental scandal.

"What can be more delightful than finding a witty and erudite author with a huge backlist to devour like chocolate ganache bon bons?"

Diamond slowly uncovers suspicious evidence that the man he saved might be a serial killer who in fact may have been fleeing the scene of his most recent murder. The dilemma of the bonding that takes place during a life-saving procedure and the gumshoe police work of building a case against the old man provide a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. What is more fun than trying to tease out the knotted but adroitly woven storyline?

This pushed me to explore the earlier adventures of this fascinating detective, which led me to download a couple of Lovesey’s first books. In the opening installment of the series, THE LAST DETECTIVE, Diamond quits in a huff from the local police department in an interdepartmental dispute. He ends up as a mall cop in which he becomes entangled in a murder, not helping him get back into the good graces of his former employers. We find that his humble employment has not changed in book two, DIAMOND SOLITAIRE, as he’s still slogging along as a rent-a-cop at Harrod’s, which entangles him in a humdinger of an international incident, involving kidnap, murder, Big Pharma and drug smuggling. Classic action-packed and often ingenious plot twists make the pages fly by.

Okay, I’m hooked. And happily I have 13 more books to see how he gets from rent-a-cop back to Chief Inspector in what promises to be a checkered career path. How I do love the hero complete with warts and all.  

The joy, as in so many British detective stories, is two-fold: rich characters, from the principals and bad guys right down to the bit players, and picturesque English locales that provide the armchair traveler with delightfully itchy feet. Left to my own devices, I would read nothing but mystery, detective, suspense and psychological thrillers. The best of the best mystery writers are legion: from Agatha Christie, the Grande Dame of murder, to P.D. James and Elizabeth George, who helped the genre move from the murder/suspense pigeonhole into the literary category.

What gives a writer that genius ability to create characters as common to readers’ lexicon as the author, perhaps even more so? Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Lynley, Adam Dalgliesh, Hercule Poirot, Flavia da Luce, Agatha Raisin, Hamish Macbeth, Amelia Peabody. A parlor game might be fun, matching characters to their creators.

My bookshelves sag with British authors’ series, so how the heck did I miss Peter Lovesey? No more, my friends, no more. What can be more delightful than finding a witty and erudite author with a huge backlist to devour like chocolate ganache bon bons? If having “Masterpiece Theatre” productions of some of his earlier work and receiving nearly every major mystery writer award in the UK wasn’t enough to grab my attention, then I bow my head --- not in shame, but with joy and anticipation of the hunt.