Written in 1992 The Last Detective is set in Bath, where Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has fairly recently transferred from the Met. A woman’s naked body is found in a lake, leading to a difficult identification and then a tricky murder investigation involving academics, possibly dodgy businessmen and others. Diamond himself is an irascible, technophobic man whose old-fashioned coppering is at odds with more modern police procedure, especially the use of the dreaded computers. It’s a decent set-up and the opening is pretty good, if somewhat familiar. The sense of place in Bath is very well done and there is a well researched, wry and interesting look at Jane Austen’s connections with the city in the background.
It’s all OK, if slightly plodding, for a while, but the clichés of the genre and implausibilities begin to mount up, and after a cataclysmic (and hard to believe) event in Diamond’s career there is a good deal of extraneous detail as another officer smugly pursues an obvious solution. (Does the excessively described smugness and self-satisfaction perhaps give you any clue as to whether he is right or whether he will be made to look foolish by Diamond in the end?) Following a scarcely credible one-to-one death struggle in a famous but deserted location, the whole thing became ludicrously implausible, I’m afraid, including late and blindingly obvious realisations presented as shrewd insights, a laughably unlikely courtroom confession and an apparent Total Personality Transplant for Diamond.
I became very fed up with all this by the end. I may possibly try another instalment sometime, just to see whether things improve – and how this can possibly be a series after developments here – but not for some while, I’m afraid.
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