Red herrings, anyone?

I've decided to take a brief break from my typical interest in cozy mysteries to try something a little different. I've never read much in the way of police procedurals, but after coming across Peter Lovesey's Diamond Dust, I thought I would give the subgenre another try.

Part of Lovesey's series surrounding Detective Inspector Peter Diamond, Diamond Dust picks up with Diamond at a sort of ebb in his career. Wrapped up in fighting a possible demotion, he thinks nothing of stopping by a recently discovered murder near Bath's Royal Crescent--only to be stunned to find the victim is his own wife. Diamond quickly embarks on an investigation to locate her killer, but a police force leery of a grieving husband commanding an investigation quickly relegates Diamond to a desk job. Frustrated and under suspicion, he begins his own parallel search into his wife's past, only to realize that his someone from own past might know more than they let on.

That's the main premise of the story, at least. I had never read anything by Lovesey before, a longtime writer who has won pretty much every award in the mystery genre. That he deserves the accolades is apparent in the bewildering array of blind alleys, false leads and subplots that keep Diamond (and the reader) throughly at a loss as to who the culprit is. There's a lot of shifty intrigue going on here, and the fact that Lovesey can keep a grip on the plot thread while still propelling the mystery forward is remarkable. But this fast and convoluted plot comes at the sacrifice of character development. Diamond is portrayed as a hard-nosed, tough veteran who isn't really meant to be likeable, but this doesn't explain why I had little sense of him as a character. Understandably, the other players are lightly sketched, but more on Diamond's wife would have made her less a bloodied body and more of a human being, and lent some humanity to her grieving husband. If Lovesey's characters were as complex as the tightly knotted mysteries he creates, there would be little to find fault with his novels.