Not one of his better stories. He sends his female sgt detective on an undercover role of which she has no training and does not tell his direct report what he is up to. He leads us around with various suspects only to pull an unidentified suspect at the end. This is so British. I have come to ignore the obvious suspects in all British mysteries as they all pull the same technique. It must be a staple in writing classes. There is also and unexplained suicide and a missing team member that appears with a bonk on head. Diamond's career is saved yet again. ( )

A medieval stone carving seems unlikely to incite murder, but an armed robbery gone wrong proves to have a complicated genesis and several red-herrings. ( )

An unusually light hearted Peter Diamond puts the pieces together with much more help from others than usual although the solution is entirely his. Unusual is the number of loose ends that remain after the end.Still, it is also unusual that someone else is center stage for a significant portion of the book. This is not Lovesey's best. ( )

Having been impressed with most of the Diamond series this one is a stinker. There are so many holes in the plot it is a wonder it was ever published. One iffy hole maybe acceptable but there are glaringly three of them. Do they not employ editors anymore?

His short stories are gems but I will never recommend him again other than with that caveat. ( )

From all of Peter Lovesey’s Peter-Diamond-novels “The Stone Wife” has the lowest rating on Amazon, so it was not without a certain trepidation that I started reading the book fearing it would turn out to be a complete train wreck. I needn’t have worried since it is still a solid piece of entertainment. It is perhaps best to approach this work as a fun caper novel rather than a traditional mystery. Several plot developments do not make much sense. “Someone will have to go undercover!” Peter Diamond exclaims after being confronted with the crime. But why exactly? The reasons given for this unusual form of investigation seem far-fetched and not very credible. It is apparently to find out where the gun that was used came from. Since gun-laws in Britain are very strict, British criminals borrow their weapons from arms dealers. Still, this is basically just an excuse to give Sergeant Ingeborg Smith more to do. Smith, originally from Germany, was a journalist at first before becoming member of the police force and Diamond’s most trusted assistant. Here she gets her fair share of the action with getting kidnapped, clambering over roof-tops, putting her martial arts skills to good use and partaking in a car chase. The plot gets more and more ludicrous as it progresses. Of course reading a mystery requires you to suspend your disbelief to some extent and if one is able to do that The Stone Wife works.

The Stone Wife of the title was a character in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so Peter Diamond tries to find out as much as his can about the sculpture and the Chaucer connection having to behave more like a literary historian than a policeman.

Peter Lovesey is a bit like the Clint Eastwood of mystery fiction. Still going strong after decades and even his failures are sort of entertaining.

I remember reading an interview with Lovesey from long ago where he talked about his writing process saying that he outlined his stories before starting. Then in a more recent interview he admitted not doing that anymore and this might be the reason why the plot in The Stone Wife feels disjointed. I had the impression that the author was making it up as he went along. The various plot strands do come together eventually, but not in an entirely satisfying way.

I think with the Diamond books the reader should really start at the beginning, since these later entries are a bit weaker and don’t show Lovesey at the top of his game. Still after all the negative reviews I read this was a positive surprise. ( )