2.5 stars from me. Peter Diamond was not made for the country life. Yet he finds himself birthing calves and climbing grain silos in a farming village. And, of course, solving a murder that is already officially solved. As a mystery, this was rather underwhelming. I found the story plodding at times, and Diamond was, frankly, quite annoying.

But I'm sad that this will be the last Peter Diamond book. I used to love this series, but haven't been keeping up with them in the last decade or so. Time to catch up, perhaps.

What is advertised as the final Peter Diamond mystery, Against the Grain, the 22nd entry in the impressive series, is a marvelous send off for the cantankerous but brilliant detective. When Peter’s former deputy, Julie Hargreaves—who quit the Bath CID years earlier after she “wearied of his [Diamond’s] overbearing conduct”—has asked Diamond to visit her for a week at her home in the Somerset Village of Baskerville. Diamond does his best trying to avoid the visit, but he is ultimately convinced it is the right thing to do by his romantic partner, Paloma.

When Diamond and Paloma arrive, they find that Julie has been blinded by macular degeneration. A condition she kept secret from Diamond when they worked together and may have been the true reason she left Bath. Julie is content with her life, but she has a request of Diamond. Claudia Priest, the heiress of a local dairy farm and Baskerville’s primary employer, was convicted to three years’ incarceration for manslaughter when a party game went horribly wrong. A former lover and then-hanger-on of Claudia’s, Roger Miller, was trapped and crushed to death in a grain silo while trying to recover a garter that would win him the favors of Claudia for the evening. Claudia, without much fuss, was convicted of negligent manslaughter, but Julie believes Claudia was treated unfairly during the trial and she asks Diamond to do his own investigation—off the books, of course—to determine if Claudia is truly guilty. A request Diamond jumps at since it will be his first village mystery, and he would like to test himself as an amateur sleuth against the likes of Miss Marple.

Against the Grain is a smart fair-play traditional mystery in the style of the golden age of detection. Diamond is his usual stubborn, at times affable, at times irascible, and always genius self. His interactions with the locals—a laconic and moody teenager named Hamish, the local busy body, a talkative barmaid—are often uncomfortable and always funny. Diamond takes a few wild swings at investigating—he plays at being Columbo and then Poirot—but as the tale winds down he finds his detecting mojo and unravels the mystery as only Peter Diamond can do. And that final revelation is as surprising as it is good.

I am a big fan of the Peter Diamond mystery series and this book is the last installment. The story reminds me of Tana French’s The Wych Elm about a family that find a body in the hollow trunk of a tree in their yard. Diamond is visiting friends in a small town and learns a neighbor is imprisoned when a body is found in the grain silo of her dairy farm. The mystery is who killed this person in the silo, and meantime another body turns up in the mansion.

The Final Outing…
The final outing in the Peter Diamond series finds Diamond with a rather more unusual case on his hands. Can he really make the cut investigating a village murder as an amateur sleuth? Is his ambit really a bit of the more cosy end of crime? After all, Diamond is most certainly not a country copper. The countryside leaves him rather cold if truth be told. As Diamond gets into his stride, whilst staying with former colleague Julie with Bella , Paloma and Raffles also in residence, secrets will most definitely out and old lives will be laid bare. An enjoyable, entertaining and fun end to what has been a most superlative series.

Lovers of British Police Procedurals, meet Peter Diamond. If you don’t already know him, now’s the perfect time to get acquainted, as Against the Grain is the 22nd book in the series and its conclusion.

The first book in the Peter Diamond series, The Last Detective, came out in 1991. I discovered the series about 10 years ago, because many of the audio versions were narrated by my favorite audio book narrator, the incomparable Simon Prebble. When I started the series in the middle, Diamond was in a stable relationship with his girlfriend Paloma. (Shockingly, the author had killed off Diamond’s wife in an early series entry.) I continued forward as new books came out but also went back and read earlier books in the series. I’m still missing a few, but they are all on my “to be read” list.

Diamond is gruff and old school, but he learns and grows over the years. He makes mistakes and works with intelligent, competent coworkers who help him to become a better boss and coworker. The series is set in Bath, so if you are a fan of English history there are a lot of fun references. Diamond can laugh at himself, and I admire the author for actually deliberately wrapping up a long running series.

In Against the Grain, Lovesey takes on the village murder mystery. He compares himself to a lot of the great detectives, from Miss Marple to Columbo. He climbs a tall ladder to the top of a silo and helps a cow give birth. There’s a country dance at a harvest festival. The book pokes fun at the idea of city detective Diamond in the country, but it also pays homage to the village cozy mystery. I was a little sorry we did not get to say good-bye to Diamond’s Bath colleagues.

I’m sad to say good-bye to Peter Diamond but happy for my years enjoying his exploits. Against the Grain is a fitting farewell to a long-running series. I read an advance reader copy from Netgalley. The book is available for checkout at the Galesburg Public Library.

Longtime Bath police homicide detective Peter Diamond has been on the job for over three decades now, and his boss—and nemesis—Georgina Dallymore is becoming less and less subtle in encouraging his retirement. Diamond’s longtime girlfriend Paloma persuades him to accept an invitation from one of his old colleagues, Julie Hargreaves, to visit her in her Somerset village.

Julie has ulterior motives. She’s retired, and the loss of her eyesight means she’s limited in what she can do. She’s convinced that neighbor Claudia Priest was wrongfully convicted of murder years ago. Claudia has served half her sentence and may be paroled soon. Julie wants to prove that the victim, Roger Miller, was murdered by somebody else, and in light of her disability, she needs Diamond to do the heavy lifting.

For those who have been reading this series for the last decades, it’s well known that Diamond is a grump at the best of times. Now he’s in the country, which he usually avoids like the plague, and is feeling guilty about how he was not a good mentor to Julie back in the day.

To his surprise, Diamond is quickly accepted by the villagers in his assumed role as Peter Dee, definitely not a police detective. He becomes involved in village life in just a few days, all leading to a big village harvest party, with Claudia returning home, and the case coming to a head.

I enjoyed this final entry in the Peter Diamond series. I’m sorry to say that part of my enjoyment was the absence of Diamond’s Bath colleagues. I’ve long found the Georgina Dallymore character hard to take. She’s like a caricature of a nightmare female boss, and her depiction has always made me leery of Lovesey’s attitudes toward women. Also, I’ve never thought he did a great job fully developing the other member’s of Peter Diamond’s detective squad. In this book, Dallymore and the squad members are absent. It’s just Diamond, Paloma, Julie, and a collection of village characters, and that’s all to the good. An entertaining sendoff for a long-running series.

Against the Grain is a grand grand finale for Peter Diamond and an incredible finish to Peter Lovesey’s series about the irascible detective.
Diamond has his first case out of Bath and it’s not exactly a real case as he pretends he’s not a police detective but only a friend of someone in the small Somerset village of Baskerville.

The person he and his partner are visiting in the country is his old police chum Julie who has gone blind from macular degeneration but has adapted well and walks with a cane and a guide dog Bella who gets along easily with Peter’s cat Raffles.

Julie asks Peter to look into the case of Claudia, the daughter of a wealthy deceased farmer, who was convicted of manslaughter after an old boyfriend, Roger Miller, of hers was found dead in a silo four months after a wild party she held with a pink garter around his arm.

Julie believes Claudia was innocent and wrongly convicted and wants Peter to look into the case. He does and goes around the village talking to the farm manager Jim, his wife, Agnes, the pub waitress, Dolores, the gift shop owner, Maggie Harrap, and Jim and Agnes’ son Hamish.

He also spends a day back in Bath talking to other party goers who were also searching for the pink garter as part of Claudia’s party game, Fabio Fortunato, Harvey Hertzog and Bert Donato as well as Harvey’s girlfriend Elaine.

Peter returns to Baskerville and somehow gets involved in the barn with cows and delivers a calf and becomes a local hero.

Then he and Paloma help get ready for the annual Harvest Festival and attend as does Claudia who has been released from jail earlier and all her party friends and all the locals. There’s lots of food and dancing and fun.

Meanwhile Peter is looking for Bert who he thinks is up to no good. Claudia helps him and they eventually find Bert’s bloody body buried beneath the stairs in a hidden bolt hole. Claudia is arrested and charged with murder.

Peter is sure she is innocent. He just needs to figure out who the murderer is. What an amazing and interesting end to a novel! Read it and find out!

Peter Diamond and his partner go to visit his former colleague Julie in the village of Baskerville near Bath. He is Chief of the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad. When they get to Julie's home, they soon find that she is now blind and that she wants Peter to investigate an accident at a nearby farm where she believes a young woman, Claudia, has been wrongly arrested and is now in jail. She is the daughter of the former owner of the farm which is now being run by Abby and Douglas with the help of their son Hamish.

Claudia had set up a game to find a hidden garter, and it appears that the man who found the garter in a silo was set up to be killed, but probably not by Claudia. She had been having wild parties and several of those coming to her parties could be looking for why the owner of a farm seemed to have so much money. Peter even learns how to help a calf be born and drive a tractor in the trying to keep his real job a secret and to find the real killer.

This is a good story and it isn't until almost the end that we discover the real culprit. I thank Netgalley and Soho Press for the ARC so that I could read the book before publication.

I used to enjoy this series, but toward the end I lost interest. I am not sad that this is the last book. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

Thirty-two years ago, curmudgeonly, old-school Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath CID made his literary debut in the Anthony Boucher Award-winning The Last Detective, exonerating a woman accused of murder. Three decades later, the seasoned cop, much to his dismay, is under pressure to retire. For Diamond, whose identity is tied to his job, “retirement is the waiting room for death.” But his partner, Paloma, convinces him to accept his former colleague Julie Hargreaves’s invitation to visit her in the quaint village of Baskerville. Leaving the mean streets of Georgian Bath for rural Somerset, Diamond soon learns that Julie has an ulterior motive for his visit; unable to proceed further in her inquiries due to a physical disability, she wants her old boss to reexamine (unofficially) the manslaughter conviction of farm owner Claudia Priest for the suffocation death of a man in a grain silo. Julie suspects that the fatal accident was murder and that someone other than Claudia was responsible. Embarking on a busman’s holiday as an undercover detective, Diamond aims to solve his first village mystery, even if it means mucking in real mud (including reluctantly helping a cow give birth). As he tries on different amateur sleuthing hats (bumbling Columbo, nosy Miss Marple), he begins to learn things about himself that reveal there might be a possibility of a good life after retirement. MWA Grand Master Lovesey bids a fond farewell to his protagonist with this bittersweet series finale that mixes a cozy Midsomer Murders setting with colorful characters, surprising twists, and plenty of heart and humor.

Every good thing must come to an end. And that includes the award-winning Peter Diamond series. In his last adventure, Diamond and Paloma are invited to the country to visit with Diamond's old partner, Julia. Julia's instincts tell her that the local farm owner, who is convicted of manslaughter, wasn't the real perpetrator.

Once he knows the real reason he's out in the country, how does he go about helping Julia with the investigation. Does he reveal that he's a copper? Or does he recreate the methods of the great literary "amateur" sleuths? He chooses the later.

There's a reason that the Peter Diamond series has been so successful. A wonderful writing style helps us like Peter, despite all of his flaws. The ending of this one wasn't all that subtle. But it was still a great read. It was a great story to send off this wonderful sleuth!

I don’t know what I’ll do if Inspector Diamond ever does retire. Relying on his stubbornness to stick around for a long time.

It took me a while to get into this title. I found it a bit slow going and lacked background on previous titles. However, I found the more I read the more I enjoyed it and was successfully stumped as to who the killer was.

This mystery was full of colorful characters, realistic twists, and a vibrant setting. There were a few plausible suspects, and though the mystery kept me on my toes, I never felt lost or confused by the plot. Having read a few books in this series, I could appreciate how this book wrapped up the storylines in a thoughtful and memorable way: clever without being too gimmicky.