Skeletal remains are found in a cellar below Bath's Georgian tearooms. To Peter Diamond's delight they are not all of medaeival origin, a radius proves to be only twenty years old and bears the marks of a sharp weapon. While a police team painstakingly sift through the cellar looking for the rest of the body, Diamond is distracted by the search for a missing American tourist, the wife of an English Professor who has been behaving very oddly.
Peter Diamond, the traditionalist dinosaur of Bath CID, finds the low murder rate in the city a touch frustrating, so he decides to check whether a couple of suicides which his colleague is investigating have been accurately classified. On the outskirts of the city a woman is found unconscious in a hospital car park, but when she recovers she can't remember who she is or how she came to be there.
The Bloodhounds of Bath is a society that meets in a crypt to discuss crime novels. To their latest recruit they are simply a gaggle of dotty misfits, until one of them reveals that he is in possession of one of the world's most valuable stamps, recently stolen from the Postal Museum. Then theft is overtaken by murder when the corpse of one of the Bloodhounds is found in a locked houseboat, with the only key in the possession of a man with a perfect alibi. Burly detective Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad in Bath, finds himself embroiled in a mystery that in more than one sense evokes the classic crime puzzles of John Dickson Carr.
Following on from the book "The Last Detective", ex-CID and difficult-to-work-with Peter Diamond is sacked from his latest job as a security guard at Harrods. Doggedly he turns his sleuthing skills to unravelling the mystery of a little Japanese girl abandoned in London.
Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond is the last detective: 'not some lad out of police school with a degree in computer studies' but a genuine gumshoe, given to doorstopping and deduction. So when the naked body of a woman is found floating in the weeds in a lake near Bath with no-one willing to identify her, no marks and no murder weapon, his sleuthing abilities are tested to the limit.
