(Detective Superintendent Roy Grace #11)
by Peter James
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Just released: October 6, 2015
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Hardback: 416 pages
Rating: 4
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series:
Dead Simple
Looking Good Dead
Not Dead Enough
Dead Man's Footsteps
Dead Tomorrow
Dead Like You
Dead Man's Grip
Not Dead Yet
Dead Man's Time
Want You Dead
You Are Dead
First sentence(s):
Logan was driving fast in the pelting rain, hurrying home, glad that her shitty day, which had gone from bad to worse, and then progressively worse still, was nearly at an end.
THEY WERE MARKED FOR DEATH. The last words Nick Walton hears from his fiancée, Logan Somervile, are in a terrified mobile phone call from her. She has just driven into the underground car park beneath the block of flats where they live in Brighton. Then she screams and the phone goes dead. The police are on the scene within minutes, but Logan has vanished, leaving behind her neatly parked car and telephone.
That same afternoon, workmen digging up an old asphalt pat in a park in another part of the city, unearth the remains of a young woman in her early twenties, who has been dead for 30 years.
At first, to Roy Grace and his team, these two events seem totally unconnected. But then another young woman in Brighton goes missing and another body from the past surfaces. Meanwhile, an eminent London psychiatrist meets with a man who claims to know a piece of information about Logan. Later Roy Grace makes the chilling realization that this one thing is the key to both the past and the present . . . Brighton has its first serial killer in over eighty years.
My two-bits:
This was my first encounter with this series starring detective Roy Grace. The story probably would have been more enjoyable for me if I had more back story regarding the main character. But, this novel can standalone for its individual case.
I found it to be a standard cat and mouse kind of thriller story that included perspectives from most members involved in an investigation of murder as well as from the killer.
The topic of serial killers is explored.
About the author:
James’s novella ‘The Perfect Murder’, started its world stage premiere in 2014, and his first Roy Grace novel Dead Simple has now been adapted for stage, and will tour the UK in 2015. In 1994, in addition to conventional print publishing, James’s novel Host was published on two floppy discs and is now in the Science Museum as the world’s first electronic novel.
Famed for his in-depth research, in 2009 James was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Brighton in recognition of his services to literature and the community, and in 2013 he was awarded an Outstanding Public Service Award by Sussex Police with whom he rides along regularly. He has also been out many times with the NYPD and the LAPD in the US and with many other police forces around the world, as well as doing extensive research with offenders in prisons and psychiatric institutions. He has served as two-times Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and is a board member of the US International Thriller Writers.
He has won numerous literary awards, including the publicly voted ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards People’s Bestseller Dagger in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for Perfect People in 2012. James’s novels have been translated into thirty-six languages and three have been turned into films.
All of his novels reflect a deep interest in the world of the police, with whom he does in–depth research and has unprecedented access, as well as science, medicine and the paranormal. A speed junkie, who in his teens was selected to train for the British Olympic Ski Team, he holds an international motor racing license and switches off from work by racing his classic 1965 BMW. James divides his time between his homes in Notting Hill in London and near Brighton in Sussex.
* review copy courtesy of Wunderkind
