This paper considers shifted inverse determinant sums arising from the union bound of the pairwise error probability for space-time codes in multiple-antenna fading channels. Previous work by Vehkalahti et al. focused on the approximation of these sums for low multiplexing gains, providing a complete classification of the inverse determinant sums as a function of constellation size for the most well-known algebraic space-time codes. This work aims at building a general framework for the study of the shifted sums for all multiplexing gains. New bounds obtained using dyadic summing techniques suggest that the behavior of the shifted sums does characterize many properties of a lattice code such as the diversity-multiplexing gain trade-off, both under maximum-likelihood decoding and infinite lattice naive decoding. Moreover, these bounds allow to characterize the signal-to-noise ratio thresholds corresponding to different diversity gains. © 2014 IEEE.