One of the many reasons I enjoy reading mysteries is coming back to a character I enjoy being with. I guess it all started with Miss Marple many years ago. Over the course of the last few years, detectives created by Donna Leon, Elizabeth George, Louise Penny, and Andrea Camillera are probably my favorites. I was looking forward to adding a new detective to this list when I started to read “The Tooth Tattoo,” Peter Lovesey’s latest.
According to the book jacket, Lovesey has written eleven novels in his Peter Diamond series. “The Tooth Tattoo” is number twelve. Peter Diamond is the head of the Criminal Investigation Division in Bath, England. I do favor detectives that live outside the US.
The body of a young Japanese girl has been found floating in a canal that runs through Bath. After much investigation the corpse it identified as a student with a deep interest in music. This is the connection that links the murder with a newly reformed string quartet that is performing and teaching at the local university. The Staccati Quartet was a well-known string group that had faded from the music scene when its violist disappeared several years before. The group has reformed with a new member and has come to Bath to perform and teach.
Diamond and his team are charged with finding the killer. The trail will lead them to an unsolved death of another Japanese student in Vienna, the “lost” member of the Quartet and, of course, the killer of the girl with the tooth tattoo.
I enjoyed my first encounter with Peter Diamond, but I probably should have read one of the early books in the series because I didn’t get a good sense of who Diamond really is from this story. Anyone with an interest in music and mysteries would enjoy “The Tooth Tattoo.” Lovesey has done a good job of weaving the story and the world of music together.