Bath police detective Peter Diamond suffers no fools. Now his nightmare has come to pass: he has to collaborate with the most preposterous kind of fool he can imagine. The self-styled Johnny Getz (his business card proclaims he “Getz

Results!”) is a private investigator who has been hired to track down Septimus “Seppy” Hubbard, a missing antiques dealer whose case Diamond has been assigned by the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad. Johnny Getz is a Philip

Marlowe wannabe, complete with ridiculous private eye duds and a frustratingly high (and inaccurate) opinion of his detection skills. But is Getz’s real job to find a missing victim or to stymie Diamond’s progress?

In this celebration of the mystery genre’s greatest practitioners and most outrageous heroes, Peter Lovesey delivers another perfect Golden Age–style puzzle mystery, rippling with unforgettable one-liners and slapstick adventure,

and sparkling with brilliantly drawn secondary characters.