The New York Times
Peter Lovesey loves strong women, cerebral killers and diabolical puzzles -- the very ingredients that make The House Sitter one of the most cunning mysteries in his Inspector Diamond series. — Marilyn Stasio
The Washington Post
Lovesey writes a compact, tart prose that leaves ample space for the story to emerge without fanfare and for the dialogue to carry the weight of dawning realizations. He is deft at swinging among points of view, following Hen and Diamond by turns, using each to disarm the other's hypotheses. The false leads, the frequent recounting of past crimes solved and unsolved, and the bit-by-bit revelations of their colleagues' quirky personalities add considerable pleasure to the tale. — Paul Skenazy
Publishers Weekly
In his eighth Inspector Diamond mystery (after 2002's Diamond Dust), Lovesey demonstrates, lest anyone doubt, how richly he deserves the British Crime Writers Association's Lifetime Achievement award. It's been about a year since Inspector Diamond's wife was murdered, and he's back at the helm of the Bath homicide squad when he hears from Inspector Henrietta "Hen" Mallin. Hen and her team have identified a murder victim found on a Sussex beach as Emma Tysoe, reported missing from her teaching position at the university in Bath. More interesting to both police units is Emma's side job as criminal profiler. Thus two puzzles neatly intersect: who killed the profiler, and who is the killer the profiler was tracking? The two detectives approach the question from opposite ends, slowly forging an effective, respectful partnership. Hen, a petite, cigar-smoking dynamo who gained her rank on sheer talent, offers something few in Bath CID would have believed possible-an equal match for Peter Diamond. Lovesey is a master of intricate plotting. A Paiute water basket is not more tightly constructed than this extraordinary story, nor more exquisite. The identity of the killer, when finally revealed, is genuinely startling, and not because of authorial obfuscation. The writing is as smooth as polished steel, and the small touches that reveal character, especially the memorable Hen, approach genius. This is Lovesey at his best. (June) Forecast: The unimaginative jacket art (a bikini-clad figure in one panel, two windows of a grand-looking house in another) won't attract casual browsers, but Lovesey fans will know better. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Initially brought in as an auxilliary police consultant, Bath's Inspector Peter Diamond soon proves himself indispensable to a missing person case-turned-murder investigation. A woman from Bath discovered dead on a Sussex beach turns out to have been strangled-apparently right there in the midst of a crowd. The main witnesses, a family of three, seem to be hiding something. The victim was a psychological offender profiler, apparently working on the case of a serial murderer-perhaps the one who claimed her life. Exacting but comfortable prose, careful detailing, and the more-than-competent Diamond give body to an excellent procedural, the eighth in Lovesey's series. For fans of British crime fiction. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The master of the cozy cerebral mystery pairs the Bath Murder Squad's cantankerous Peter Diamond (Diamond Dust, 2002, etc.) with cigar-smoking Henrietta "Hen" Mallin, Senior Investigating Officer at Bognor Regis, and sets them loose to find the audacious murderer of crime profiler Emma Tysoe, who was strangled on a Sussex beach alongside other bathers who noticed nothing amiss. Was her death the handiwork of the serial killer she was trying to identify, whose first victim was film director Axel Summers? Jimmy Barneston, placed in charge of that hush-hush investigation (and determined to keep his two trysts with Dr. Tysoe off the record), thinks not. After all, that killer preferred to use an arcane weapon, a crossbow, and left clues from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as to his next two victims. Even so, Diamond, who treads where more circumspect types fear to go, is convinced the two cases dovetail and determined to work them both. When Barneston falls apart after one of his targeted charges, golf phenom Matthew Porter, is murdered in a supposedly safe house, it's Diamond who tries to protect the other intended victim, singer/philanthropist Anna Walpurgis. But the "Mariner" killer finds her, too, and her death is only a moan away when Diamond comes to the rescue. Brusque Diamond and plainspoken Mallin make an engaging team, and few, if any, can top Lovesey in not only creating believable red herrings and plot twists but whetting an appetite for rereading the English classics from Austen to Coleridge.
