Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Doubleday inaugurates their ``Perfect Crime'' imprint with a body in a lake, soon identified as former soap-opera actress Gerry Snoo. Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond, charged with but recently absolved of malicious interrogation techniques, focuses on the victim's husband, university professor Greg Jackman, a local hero for saving young Matt Didrikson from drowning in the weir. Did Greg kill his wife in order to dally with Matt's mum, Dana? Did Dana do it for love of Greg? Or? At odds with his supervisor over procedures, Diamond resigns from the force but then investigates on his own. Finally, when Dana is charged, he offers telling tidbits to establish her innocence--and cause the courtroom breakdown of her employer, a drug importer with ties to cocaine addict Snoo. Crafty authorial misdirection--including a subplot about the authenticity and robbery of a pair of Jane Austen letters--as well as writing skills that have justifiably earned Lovesey international awards, plus a PBS following for his Sergeant Cribb series. Top-form Lovesey.

Publishers Weekly
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Irascible, corpulent, cynical Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Avon and Somerset murder squad attributes Britain's decline as a world power to the abolition of capital punishment in 1964. Spurning computer gadgetry, he sticks to common sense, index cards and gumshoeing: ``Knocking on doors. That's how we get results.'' The almost clueless case of the naked woman's body found floating in Chew Valley Lake poses a supreme challenge for the detective, who is anxious to clear his name of recent charges of brutality. The belated identification of the victim as actress Geraldine Snoo, written out of a BBC soap opera two years before, leads to one surprise after another, including the claim of the victim's professor husband that she had tried to kill him, and culminating in the suspenseful trial of divorced mother Dana Didrikson whom Geraldine had accused of trying to steal her husband. Diamond refutes genetic fingerprinting evidence against Dana and, in a stunning last scene, reveals the killer's identity. Lovesy, winner of a Silver Dagger Award for Waxwork and a Golden Dagger for The False Inspector Dew, uses Bath as his setting, treating us to a great chase through the Roman baths for which the town is named. This witty novel gets the new Perfect Crime imprint (formerly Crime Club) off to a flying start. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

With this intricate, masterful, many-tiered examination of police work, Doubleday launches a new hardcover crime series called Perfect Crime Books, which will supersede the overly cozy Doubleday Crime Club. The editors promise more American authors in the new series, which will also feature paperback tie-ins with Bantam's excellent crime reprint line. In The Last Detective, modern forensic technology, complete with computers and genetic fingerprinting, clashes with the motives and methods of anachronistic copper Peter Diamond, whose rough-and ready ways have gotten him in heaps of trouble. Now Diamond, delightfully human, shrewd but often dead wrong, struggles against bureaucratic intervention in a murder investigation. Geraldine Snoo, whose corpse was found in a lake, was a former soap star who left behind debts, a history of neurotic behavior, and an indifferent husband who, through a bizarre series of events, has come into possession of two letters written by Jane Austen. Lovesey moves seamlessly between third-person narration and the first-person recollections of various witnesses. Clues are littered all over the place, but only a few matter and none makes any kind of sense until much later, after the wrong person is set to take the fall and a missing household possession points the way towards a whole new avenue of investigation, one the loathed technocrats in their white coats managed to miss. Everything meshes perfectly in this air-tight tale: Lovesey's books should be force-fed to fledgling crime writers who believe plotting is unimportant. ~--Peter Robertson