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The House Sitter (Hardcover)

by Peter Lovesey (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 404 pages
  • Publisher: Little, Brown (6 Mar 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0316725315
  • ISBN-13: 978-0316725316
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 986,650 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Lovesey's writing is lucid and succinct, and he is a consumate story-teller.' Colin Dexter 'Pure joy.' The Scotsman 'Phone-off-the-hook time.' The Independent


Product Description

The identification of the woman found murdered on Whiteview Sands poses more questions than it answers. Emma Tysoe was a respected psychologist and an official criminal profiler with several successful cases to her credit. Why was she sun-bathing alone so far from home? How did she get there? Who is the mysterious 'Ken' in her private life? What was the murder weapon? Why did the man who noitce she was dead then completely disappear from the scene? When Peter Diamond is brought into the investigation he sheds some light on these matters - most importantly by discovering that she had been seconded under the greatest secrecy to work on the profile of the person who has assassinated one celebrity and is threatening to kill more. Are these killings connected to Emma's death? Diamond thinks so, but he cannot persuade his colleagues to agree with him, and even he cannot make all the pieces fit the jigsaw he's envisaged.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Up to his usual high standard, 11 Jul 2004
By Anthony Harrison "Interceptor7" (Bristol, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The House Sitter (Paperback)
The House Sitter is the latest Peter Diamond mystery and fans of Peter Lovesey's flawed detective, will not be disappointed. As ever, the Bath locations are skillfully recreated and Lovesey's warmth for the city certainly comes through. The plot, concerning the apparent murder of a psychologist whilst sunbathing on the beach, is well constructed, with plenty of twists to keep the reader wrong-footed. At first it appears that the case isn't going to allow Diamond to take centre stage, with much of the action centred on the south east coast. But that soon changes, and with his usual tact, Diamond once again solves the mystery. For me, one of the high points is his love-hate relationship with his superior office, Georgina Dallimore - their scenes are brilliant.

For fans and those new to Lovesey's work alike, read this book - it's up there with his best. This is an intricate and involving story from a highly skilled crime fiction practitioner. Read it.

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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Serial Killer Blues, 16 Sep 2004
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The House Sitter (Paperback)
've long fondled Lovesey's books at the library, but this eighth in his Peter Diamond series is the first I've actually read. It starts with a family on an outing to the beach near XX. The all-too-typical day on the beach suddenly becomes creepy when the couple's young daughter goes missing. At the end of a frantic search, a more troubling discovery is madeóthe body of a dead woman. It's a nice little trick to draw the reader in, using one situation as the warm up to the main course.

The dead woman is soon determined to have been strangled while lying on the beach in plain view. This is a sort of reversal of the traditional locked-room mystery, with the added complications of the tide having washed away all forensic evidence, and no clue as to the victim's identity. Tough, cigarillo-smoking D.I. Hen Mallin is assigned to the case, and the difficulties just keep on multiplying even once the victim is identified as a psychologist from Bath who consulted with the police as a criminal profiler. The Bath connection brings with it the involvement of the acerbic Peter Diamond, and the two strong personalities must figure out a way to work with each other.

When they discover that the woman had been working on a hush-hush serial killer case, Diamond subtlety hijacks that case as well. This strand of the book gets a little baroque, as the serial killer invokes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in a quest to kill Britain's leading film director, a professional golf phenom, and a libidinous ex-pop star turned industrialist. Whether this fantastical case is related to the profiler's death is a key question, and one that isn't answered until the climax.

The investigation is fairly interesting, as encrypted files on the psychologist's computer are decoded, two key witnesses to the beach affair go missing, and all manner of complications are strewn in Diamond and Hen's path. And while this procedural stuff is good, the larger matter of the serial killer left me rather cold. The serial killer is an overused character in fiction, and I tend to find plots revolving around them rather boring. The twisted madness to their methods always come across as over-the-top, and motivations always seem disproportionately thin. This book is no exception, which is too bad, because otherwise, it's quite a good read and the characters draw one in. I will definitely seek out others in the series.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Peter Diamond shines, 13 Jul 2003
By L. Smith (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Count me as one of Peter Lovesey's Yank fans who reads everything he writes. That said, although I enjoyed his latest Peter Diamond mystery, I was less than enthralled with the character of Emma, the profiler whose murder opens the novel. Her sophomoric gushings over a handsome detective, as revealed in personal notes on her laptop, showed her to be shallow, immature, insensitive, and possessed of very little insight. This, in turn, caused me to doubt her skill as a profiler and to wonder why the police thought she was a star in her field. The character, in short, lacked credibility.

Lovesey's development of Peter Diamond's character, on the other hand, was skillful and evocative. Diamond is a flesh-and-blood personality, growing with each book. I expect his next outing to be more to my liking, since the one character in this one that didn't ring true is conveniently dead.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent crime story
I have only recently started reading Peter Lovesey and this is the first one I've read featuring Diamond. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Damaskcat

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