Through a particularly tragic series of events, couch potato Maeve Kelly has been forced to sign up for the Other Half, Bath’s springtime half-marathon. What Maeve doesn’t know is just how brutal some of the other runners are.

As race day draws closer, an Albanian refugee named Spiro makes a run for freedom on the other side of town, escaping the chain gang that has held him hostage and its murderous foreman, who is known to his charges as ‘The Finisher’. ‘The Finisher’ has killed for disobedience before, and Spiro knows there’s a target on his back as he tries to lose himself in the genteel medieval city of Bath.

Meanwhile Detective Peter Diamond is tasked with crowd control on the raucous day of the race – and catches sight of a violent criminal he put away a decade ago and who very much seems to be up to his old tricks now that he is paroled. Diamond’s hackles are already up when he learns that one of the runners never crossed the finish line and has disappeared without a trace. Was Diamond a spectator to the prelude to a murder?

I normally enjoy the Peter Diamond mysteries. They’re set in Bath, a town I’ve lived in for decades. The mysteries are normally intriguing and Peter Diamond’s belligerence is often amusing. I’ve had ‘The Finisher’ on my shelves for nearly five years now so I tugged it to the top of my TBR pile and settled in for a comfortable read. I didn’t expect to be setting it aside three hours later because I was bored.

Things started to go wrong from the opening scene with Diamond trying to use an old-style wallplanner to convince management that his team was busy. It should have been a bit of fun but, for me at least, it fell flat and I began to imagine what a chore it would be to work for Diamond and endure his endless complaints about how things have changed.

Then, Diamond disappeared for a bit and I met two of the main characters, a young teacher whose conscience pushes her into signing up to run her first half-marathon for charity and an Albanian man escaping from modern slavery and the clutches of a lethal overseer known at The Finisher. I was interested in both of them, so, for a while, all was well.

Then nothing much happened. For nearly three hours.

That’s a little unfair perhaps. Peter Lovesey has given me a good tour of Bath, shared some nuggets from its recent history (some of which. like the explanation of Bog Island, I’ve been here long enough to see happening), shared techniques for training for a long-distance run, shown some of what it’s like to be homeless on Bath’s streets and given a good description of taking part in the Bath Half.

BUT… the whole thing felt more like a travelogue than a mystery. The pace was as slow as a punt down the Avon and as free of tension.

Then Diamond reappeared and I realised that his old-duffernees was irritating me rather than drawing me into the story.

I think the murder will happen soon and I think it will be unpleasant but I’ve lost interest so I’m setting this aside.

I still have the twenty-third Peter Diamond book, ‘Showstopper’ (2023) in my TBR. I’ll give that a try before I decide if I’m done with this series.