The Vault

I have read a few of Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series of crime novels and enjoyed them. The other night I was rummaging around in my unread books pile and came across a very old and battered copy of The Vault. I just fancied reading something not too deep and crime-ish. It is excellent. Bath, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and William Blake's art - pretty good combination really I thought.

It is a complex story of all sorts of disparate bits which are, of course, all interconnected. The characters are well drawn - an eccentric antiques dealer, a flash local councillor, an apparent hippie who runs a travelling puppet theatre, a persistent journalist who wants to join the police and an English Literature Professor from the US who is crazy about Mary Shelley. I can't really write any more about it without giving away the plot but I really enjoyed it.