Customer Reviews

Not Dead Enough

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter James' hero, Roy Grace, acts as like a football coach dispatching his assisting police officers to undertake the various investigative, technological and scientific tasks to solve the brutal slaying of a wealthy woman in Brighton. The cops meet each evening to review the day's work ratcheting up the revelations like a wrench turning and turning as the intensity of the storyline moves closer to the end. Grace puts on his helmet at the end to finish off the solution in a most energized way. To humanize Grace, the author burdens him with the anguishing search for his wife (gone missing for nine years), his new love who is threatened by the crazed murderer at the end and the recurring marriage problems of his best friend and fellow cop. James excels in descriptions of action scenes and dialogue and bringing this thriller to a satisfying ending.

A first for me...as I knew who the killer was with just over 200 pages still left to read!! - there are 610 pages altogether but I have to admit a sunny weekend in the garden and I raced through it.

Having read the others in the Roy Grace series I felt safe in the knowledge that I'd get an interesting thriller with good characterisation and this didn't disappoint. Although there are quite a few characters and several storyline threads, they just add to the realism of the story.

My only negative comment would be that I wish Grace's missing wife would turn up dead so he (and we!) can have some closure and he can move on relationship wise. That said I do think his feelings have been well written and have helped me as the reader, form a rounded picture of his character in my mind.

Looking forward to the next.

Like many readers, I first knew Peter James from his horror novels. I have been reading these Roy Grace detective novels with some interest, although I have to say that I still find myself missing something in his work.

Not Dead Enough spins a tale about a man who is a seemingly obvious murder suspect, if it only were not for the fact that it required him to to be in two places at the same time. The themes of the day are obsession and revenge. It kept me reading, I will give it that much. I do have to say that had I not been on an airplane, the overly complicated plot would most likely have struck me as rather tiresome.

The quality of the writing is good, and I like Roy Grace as a character. I plan to give James the benefit of the doubt and see if I can find something in the series than I like better than Not Dead Enough.

Not bad though, as airplane reading.

I have read two of his previous books (Dead Simple and Dead Mans Footsteps) and thoroughly enjoyed them. This one, however, I thought was too long (about 100 pages) and too wordy. It wasn't hard to figure out who did it as you went along. But, even with all that, it was better than most fiction that has come out lately.