Customer Reviews

Play Dead

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Peter Dickinson's Play Dead is a beautiful book. It is not meant to be funny or frightening, but to draw our attention to life: children, music, relationships, love. In her attempts to understand a murder, Poppy Tasker confronts the choices that have led her to become small-of-spirit. As she comes to understand the forces that led to the murder (as well as the unintended consequences of wrong conclusions about them), she learns what is important to her and becomes "She-who-knows-what-she-wants."

Peter Dickinson is one of my favorite mystery authors, and this may be his best book, less because of the mystery than because of the multidimensional, reflective protagonist, a leftish grandmother caring for her grandson while seeking a richer life. The mysterious deaths are nevertheless puzzling [and weird, as usual in Dickinson] and clues for their solution emerge in surprising ways. Admittedly, the web of relationships is a little far-fetched, but their variety lets him comment strikingly on British sociopolitical life in the early 1990s. All of his books might be called social science fiction: he creates very original contexts and then lets the interaction reveal implications as it works itself out. This book is unusually intricately developed; it's a very good read, sometimes suspenseful but more often gripping due to its intriguing creativity. It's a shame this book isn't more available and more frequently reviewed here.