Peter Lovesey

Author Information
Peter Lovesey's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    61 Books (4 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1970
  • Latest Book:
    December 2024
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Full Series List in Order

An Inspector Henrietta Malin Investigation

1 - Circle (Feb-2005)
2 - The Headhunters (Apr-2008)

A Peter Diamond Mystery

1 - The Last Detective (Sep-1991)
2 - Diamond Solitaire (1992)
3 - The Summons (Oct-1995)
4 - Bloodhounds (1996)
5 - Upon a Dark Night (1997)
6 - The Vault (Jan-1999)
7 - Diamond Dust (Jun-2002)
8 - The House Sitter (Jun-2003)
9 - The Secret Hangman (Jun-2007)
10 - Skeleton Hill (Sep-2009)
11 - Stagestruck (Jun-2011)
12 - Cop to Corpse (Jun-2012)
13 - The Tooth Tattoo (May-2013)
14 - The Stone Wife (Sep-2014)
15 - Down Among the Dead Men (Jul-2015)
16 - Another One Goes Tonight (Jul-2016)
17 - Beau Death (Dec-2017)
18 - Killing with Confetti (Jul-2019)
19 - The Finisher (Aug-2020)
20 - Diamond and the Eye (Oct-2021)
21 - Showstopper (Dec-2022)
22 - Against the Grain (Dec-2024)

A Prince of Wales Mystery

1 - Bertie and the Tinman (1987)
2 - Bertie and the Seven Bodies (Feb-1990)
3 - Bertie and the Crime of Passion (Nov-1993)

A Sergeant Cribb Mystery

1 - Wobble to Death (1970)
2 - The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (1971)
3 - Abracadaver (1972)
4 - Mad Hatter's Holiday (1973)
5 - The Tick of Death // Invitation to a Dynamite Party (1974)
6 - A Case of Spirits (1975)
7 - Swing, Swing Together (1976)
8 - Waxwork (1978)

Multi-Author Series List

Bibliomysteries

16 - Remaindered (Aug-2014)

Book List in Order: 61 titles

  • Wobble to Death

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 1

    A Mystery Writers of America “100 Best Mysteries of All Time” Crime fiction master Peter Lovesey’s debut mystery introduces Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb as he investigates a speed-walking race turned deadly. “An outstanding period p...

  • The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 2

    The discovery of the headless corpses of several well-muscled men floating in the Thames puts Detective Sergeant Cribb on the trail of some very nasty goings-on. Illegal bare-fisted prize-fighting to be precise -- a sport outlawed in late Victorian E...

  • Abracadaver

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 3

    "Fine picture of period vice, good mystery plotting, and fun.”  -- San Francisco ChronicleA sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humili...

  • Mad Hatter's Holiday

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 4

    “Lovesey’s best yet.”  -- H.R.F. Keating, The TimesBrighton, 1882: Albert Moscrop spends his holiday peering at beachgoers through a telescope, piecing together disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama for his own a...

  • The Tick of Death // Invitation to a Dynamite Party

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 5

    “Lovesey goes from strength to strength. A really entertaining extravaganza, judged to a nicety.”  -- The TimesLondon, 1884: A series of bomb blasts in public places is causing mayhem throughout the city. Even Scotland Yard’s CID office be...

  • A Case of Spirits

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 6

    “One of the best of this series . . . Lively and well-plotted.”  -- The New York Times Book ReviewThe spiritualist movement has captivated a segment of Victorian London: manifestations, the occult, and “sensitives” are in vogue. When sé...

  • Swing, Swing Together

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 7

    Elfrida College for the Training of Female Elementary Teachers encouraged the highest standards of behaviour in its young ladies. Bathing in the nude was a flagrant breach of the Rules. For Harriet Shaw this daring midnight dip caused more than a ...

  • Waxwork

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Sergeant Cribb Mystery - 8

    “At once charming, chilling and convincing as if it had unfolded in the Police Intelligence column of April, 1888.”  -- TIMELondon, 1888. Though the beautiful Miriam Cromer has confessed to the murder of her husband’s assistant, she is sti...

  • Spider Girl

    It's the early 1980s and 23-year-old Sarah Jordan, a PhD student at an American university, is studying spiders… Sarah finds her studies so absorbing, that much of campus life seems to pass her by. She barely registers her research assistant’s i...



  • The False Inspector Dew

    “Absolutely riveting . . . A masterpiece. I defy anyone to foresee the outcome.” -- Ruth RendellThe year is 1921. A passionate affair between voracious romance reader Alma Webster and her dentist, Walter Baranov, has led to his wife’s murder. T...

  • Keystone

    A British vaudeville performer turned movie cop finds himself in a real-life crime story.It’s 1916, and Warwick Easton’s traveling show has landed him in California. Out of money and about to return to England, Easton gets lucky when silent movie...

  • The Secret Lover

    in Murderous Schemes

    When plotting a murder (figuratively speaking), the mystery writer has at hand any number of M.O.'s including such tried and true conventions as the locked room, the unbreakable alibi, the double bluff, the mistaken identity, and many others. Indeed,...

  • Bertie and the Tinman

    • / Historical Mystery
    • Buy Buy
    A Prince of Wales Mystery - 1

    It is 1886 and the greatest of all jockeys, Fred Archer, has put his gun to his head and shot himself. An inquest is arranged with indecent haste. His mind was unhinged by typhoid, say the jury, despite conflicting evidence. The Prince is suspicio...

  • Rough Cider

    “Bracing psychological suspense.” -- The New York Times Book ReviewReading, England, 1964. Theo, a lonely university lecturer, is approached by an American girl named Alice who wants to learn more about her father, a GI hanged for murder in Somer...

  • Butchers and Other Stories of Crime

  • On the Edge

    Soon after World War II, two former co-workers in the operations room of a Royal Air Force Squadron meet in the street. Their lives have diverged dramatically but each wants to get rid of her husband. And so a mutual assistance pact is made....

  • The Black Cabinet

    Beginning with the bizarre case reported by the young Abraham Lincoln himself, this work discusses actual unsolved crimes--Lizzie Bordon's bloody spree, the Kitty Genovese murder, the assassination of President Lincoln--and includes stories by O. Hen...

  • Bertie and the Seven Bodies

    A Prince of Wales Mystery - 2

    The second entry of the Bertie, Prince of Wales mystery series, featuring future King Edward VII, Albert Edward, as an amateur sleuth solving suspicious murders in Victorian England.Bertie, Prince of Wales, is delighted to be invited by Lady Amelia, ...

  • The Last Detective

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 1

    A CASE THAT'S HARDER THAN A DIAMOND Lovely Gerry Snoo lived fast and died brutally. Between her meteoric rise as a soap-opera star and the night her body was fished from a lake came a professional setback, a marriage to a slick Bath University pro...



  • Diamond Solitaire

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 2

    Fired from the police for insubordination, Peter Diamond is reduced to working as a security guard at Harrod's. There he finds an abandoned Japanese girl after the store closes. He must identify her in order to save her life....

  • Bertie and the Crime of Passion

    A Prince of Wales Mystery - 3

    The third and final entry of the Bertie Prince of Wales mystery series, featuring future King Edward VII, Albert Edward, as an amateur sleuth solving suspicious murders in Victorian England.Bertie, amateur sleuth and the Crown Prince of Wales, loves ...

  • Invitation to a Dynamite Party

  • The Summons

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 3

    “The Summons is a classic.”  -- The EconomistJohn Mountjoy has escaped from prison and kidnapped the chief constable’s daughter. The only person he’ll parley with is Detective Peter Diamond, who arrested him four years earlier for t...

  • Bloodhounds

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 4

    “Peter Lovesey tosses off a real brain-banger in Bloodhounds, the fourth book in a challenging series . . . I am mad for these pyrotechnic teasers, and this one had my head spinning.” -- The New York Times Book ReviewA rare stamp and a corps...

  • A Parrot is Forever

    in Malice Domestic 5

    Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Phyllis A. Whitney, author of more than seventy bestsellers, presides over a salon of today's wittiest writers of mystery in this sparkling new addition to the series. MALICE DOMESTIC 5 once again delivers the ...

  • Upon a Dark Night

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 5

    A young woman is dumped, injured and unconscious, in a private hospital's parking lot. She is an amnesiac with no memory prior to her discovery by hospital personnel. Detective Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath homicide squad is unwilling to become...

  • Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose

    Be cautious; reading too many of Peter Lovesey's stories at once could have unexpected results. "Passion Killers" will make your toes curl for the hapless Mrs Palmer, and "The Odstock Curse" may well induce goosebumps as a Gypsy curse is repeated in ...

  • The Vault

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 6

    “Exquisitely intricate.”  -- The New York Times Book ReviewA skeletal hand is unearthed in the vault under the Pump Room in Bath, England, near the site where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Then a skull is excavated. The bones came from di...

  • Dr. Death

    in Crime Through Time III

    ANDREW GREELEY introduces a monk of the Middle Ages who investigates corruption in the Vatican to crack "The Case of the Murdered Pope"... Sir John Fielding, a blind eighteenth-century magistrate, confronts crime at a stuffy dinner party in BRUCE ALE...



  • The Secret of Spandau

    Rudolf Hess was the most closely guarded prisoner in the world. Forty-five years after his capture in Scotland on a supposed peace mission he was still in Spandau Prison. Why was it necessary to keep him there so long? He was a Nazi -- but one with a...

  • The Reaper

    “If you've never read any of [Lovesey’s] 20-plus books, this wickedly clever, beautifully written story of a murderous clergyman who earns our sympathy while dramatically whittling down his flock should make you an instant convert.” -- Chicago ...

  • The Sedgemoor Strangler and Other Stories of Crime

    The Washington Post described Peter Lovesey's crime fiction as "ingenious … irresistible … wickedly clever." In "The Sedgemoor Strangler," a serial killer leaves a naked corpse among the reeds, and a young waitress gradually comes to suspect that...

  • In Suspense

    Sarah Jordan, beautiful and clever, is a PhD researcher at a New York university. After Sarah had conquered her childhood arachnophobia, her fear turned into fascination and spiders became the focus of her studies. Captivated by their ritual of matin...

  • Diamond Dust

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 7

    Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond is confronted with a crime that comes too close to home. His beloved wife has been killed, apparently just the most recent victim in a series of murders of police spouses. Despite his superior's orders to leave ...

  • Goldengirl

    Jack Dryden is employed by a consortium of investors and Dr Serafin to maximise their return on a natural athlete. Unfortunately the athlete in question has links to Nazi Germany and cruel and unusual training methods may have been used on her. Shoul...

  • An Athletics Compendium

    The latest in a series of guides to sporting literature (earlier volumes covered association football and rugby union), An Athletics Compendium provides an extensive and authoritative overview of the United Kingdom literature of track and field. I...

  • The Man Who Jumped for England

    in Mysterious Pleasures

    'Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool. A clever fool -- perhaps -- but a fool just the same' RAYMOND CHANDLER Ever since its creation in 1953, the Crime Writers' Association has celebrated and champione...

  • The House Sitter

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 8

    The corpse of a beautiful woman, clad in only a bathing suit, is found strangled to death on a popular Sussex beach. When she is finally identified, it turns out she was a top profiler for the National Crime Faculty, who was working on the case of a ...

  • Circle

    An Inspector Henrietta Malin Investigation - 1

    Praise for The House Sitter: “Lovesey loves strong women, cerebral killers and diabolical puzzles -- the very ingredients that make The House Sitter one of the most cunning mysteries in his Peter Diamond series.” -- Marilyn Stasio, The New York ...



  • The Verdict of Us All

    Members of London s famed Detection Club have joined together to honor one of their own H.R.F. Keating, historian of the genre, winner of the Gold Dagger (for best novel) and the Diamond Dagger (for Lifetime Achievement), and creator of one of the gr...

  • The Secret Hangman

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 9

    Widowed Inspector Peter Diamond is being pursued by a secret admirer as he pursues a serial killer. Delia Williamson, a mother of two young girls who works as a waitress, is first reported missing by her own mother. She is found in a public park, han...

  • The Headhunters

    An Inspector Henrietta Malin Investigation - 2

    Gemma loathes her sleazy boss; Jo is her confidante. On a double date with Rick and Jake, they discuss forming a mutual murder society, in jest of course. The next day, Jo, walking on Selsey Beach, discovers the corpse of a drowned woman, a stranger....

  • Murder on the Short List

    A shortlist of Peter Loveseys best ever stories . . . - . . including the Crime Writers Associations best short story of 2007 and featuring some of Loveseys most popular detectives Bertie, Prince of Wales, Sergeant Cribb and Rosemary and Thyme. Join ...

  • Skeleton Hill

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 10

    On Landsdown Hill, near Bath, a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers that took place over 350 years ago is annually reenacted. Two of the reenactors discover a headless skeleton, and soon after, one of them goes missing and is later found murdered...

  • Stagestruck

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 11

    Pop diva Clarion Calhoun has packed the house with a celebrity appearance in Bath's Theatre Royal production of I Am a Camera. But within moments of her much-anticipated onstage appearance, she's pulled out of character as she screams and claws at h...

  • Cop to Corpse

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 12

    PC Harry Trasker is the third policeman in the Bath area to be shot dead in less than twelve weeks. The assassinations are the work of a sniper who seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once, always a step ahead.The younger detectives od their best w...

  • The Tooth Tattoo

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 13

    Peter Diamond, head of the Criminal Investigation Division in scenic Bath, England, is investigating the murder of a young woman whose body has been found in the canal, the only clue to her identity a tattoo of a music note on one of her teeth. For D...

  • Remaindered

    Bibliomysteries - 16

    A puzzler of a tale about a dead bookshop owner, a priceless cache of first editions, and a deadly secret taken to the grave. It’s no mystery who killed Robert Ripple, owner of Precious Finds Bookstore in Pokesville, Pennsylvania. It was Agatha Chr...

  • The Stone Wife

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 14

    Book 14 in the Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond series, one of Soho's bestselling and most critically acclaimed series, this time including a Chauceresque twist. At a Bath auction house, a large slab of carved stone is up for sale. At the h...



  • Down Among the Dead Men

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 15

    Peter Diamond takes a dive down among the dead men to solve a seven-year-old murder case in the latest installment of Peter Lovesey's classic procedural series. In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a pos...

  • Another One Goes Tonight

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 16

    In the sixteenth entry of Peter Lovesey's timeless British detective series, Peter Diamond wrestles with his own moral compass, struggling to protect police prestige while debating what it means to do right by a serial killer. Two police officers...

  • Motives for Murder

    Members of London's famed Detection Club have joined together to honor Peter Lovesey, winner multiple times of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger and Silver Dagger, and Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. He has also won the Myste...

  • Beau Death

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 17

    In the seventeenth installment in Peter Lovesey's timeless British detective series, Peter Diamond digs deep into Bath history to ferret out the secrets of one of its most famous (and scandalous) icons: Richard “Beau” Nash, who might have been th...

  • Killing with Confetti

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 18

    On a fateful July morning in 2015, a riot takes hold of Her Majesty’s Prison in Bream, Gloucestershire, with fatal consequences. The staff is caught completely off-guard -- their supervising warden, Governor Magda Lyle, hasn’t shown up for work, ...

  • The Finisher

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 19

    On the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Peter Lovesey, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and titan of the British detective novel, returns to the subject of his very first mystery -- running. Through a particularly tra...

  • Dead Gorgeous

  • Diamond and the Eye

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 20

    A Bath antiques dealer has disappeared, and detective Peter Diamond has been saddled with the "help" of a hardboiled Philip Marlowe wannabe private investigator in cracking the case. MWA Grand Master Peter Lovesey's 20th installment in the award-winn...

  • Reader, I Buried Them

    Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Peter Lovesey presents a collection of short fiction spanning fifty years, including the first story he ever published and three brand-new stories. More than fifty years ago, Peter Lovesey published a shor...

  • Showstopper

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 21

    The cast and crew of a hit British TV show are rumored to be cursed -- but are these spooky deaths coincidences or murder? It's up to Bath detective Peter Diamond to find out.In the six years since the start of the hit British TV show Swift, its cast...

  • Peter Diamond: A Mysterious Profile

    The chief of the Bath murder squad finally gets his say in this revealing mini-autobiography of the star character in the “superb series” (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times"bestselling author of the Inspector Gamache novels).Reader, you’re abou...

  • Against the Grain

    A Peter Diamond Mystery - 22

    Detective Peter Diamond goes undercover at a seasonal festival in this delightful and bittersweet conclusion to the multi-award-winning series.Detective Peter Diamond, chief of the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad, is taking a short holiday in the coun...

Award-Winning Books by Peter Lovesey

Bloodhounds
1997 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel
The House Sitter
2004 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel
The Last Detective
1992 Anthony Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Peter Lovesey has published 61 books.

The next book by Peter Lovesey, Against the Grain, will be published in December 2024.

The first book by Peter Lovesey, Wobble to Death, was published in January 1970.

Yes. Peter Lovesey has 4 series.
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