4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark & gritty British mystery, November 1, 2001
This novel is probably not for everyone. James's prose lacks the elegance of P. D. James. You sense the tortured psyches of the characters without the author's guidance through them, as Ian Rankin guides you through the cluttered mind of John Rebus. Some might be put off by the British colloquialisms, unfamilar police terms, British slang ...
Don't let any of that stop you from reading "Roses, Roses" anyway.
This novel is the first one in Bill James's Harpur & Iles series that I personally have read. Several have gone before, revealing the tangled lives of these people; Harpur, a womanizer of legendary proportions and a good policeman, and Iles, whose wife was at some point in the past one of Harpur's conquests. It's like a huge intermarried family, this series of characters. Everyone's related to someone else and all their lives touch - usually at sensitive and painful points.
This novel was recommended to me on Amazon based on my affection for the aforementioned P. D. James and Ian Rankin, and I must say it - and its author - deserve to be included in the ranks of such premier English mystery writers.
The plot you can get a summary of here at Amazon.com. My impressions, however, you get here. Nobody's sugared up or perfected in this book. Everyone's got dirty hands - and not just the detectives, but their spouses and their grasses and everyone else, except possibly Harpur's two daughters, who are well on their way to jaded viewpoints produced courtesy of seeing what their father does for a living. What the reader gets is a stimulating collection of street-wise characters who are way too human - perhaps even repellant at times - but who never leave a false note hanging in the air. The author has a clean, stripped-down narrative style that eschews unnecessary detail and keeps the pace tight in the right places at all times.
I disagree with the prior reviewer that the flashbacks to Harpur's wife, Megan, during her last hours and before that, as she makes her illicit trips to London to meet with her lover and Harpur's ex-partner, don't work. They do. You get present and past seamlessly woven together; one fleshes out the other, each makes the other more understandable. When you're with Megan in that dark car park at 2 AM, just moments before her grisly death, voyeuristically watching her mental acrobatics as she attempts to figure out how to deal with the shadowy figure lurking close by while examining the past with her lover and slowly puting together the realization that something might be dreadfully wrong, the suspense morphs into a genuine sympathy for a character who might all too easily be dismissed by the phrase "she got what was coming to her".
I'm going to go back & read James' entire Harpur & Iles series, form beginning to end. If "Roses, Roses" is any example of what I'll find when I do, I'll be a highly delighted and satisfied reader well into the year 2002.
If you're looking for a mystery series - and a set of characters - whose uniqueness, blend and taste are not only enjoyable but DIFFERENT, I suggest you run, don't walk, to Bill James's Harpur & Iles series.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Harpur Family, May 4, 2002
This one gets close to home; in the first line of the book, Colin Harpur?s wife is being murdered. The book continues by dealing with this death. Part is the interaction of Harpur with his two teenage daughters. The other part brings us the actions and thoughts his wife had on her last day. Only in the second part does the story start to take off, ending strongly with improbable happenings to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Compared to previous books in this series, it all feels like something the cat dragged in.
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1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting structure, but a disappointment., March 26, 2001
This review is from: Roses, Roses: A Harpur & Iles Mystery (Paperback)
First of all, you certainly can't say that James is unoriginal in how he structures this novel. The idea of alternate flashbacks between Harpur dealing with Megan's death and Megan's POV - as she is about to meet her lover and later, upon returning home, about to meet her killer - is quite engrossing at first. The problem is that this device quickly wears out its welcome. There is simply too much of Harpur squabbling with everyone and various internal debates going on. Just Megan's deliberations standing by her car over what she should do if a stranger is stalking her is overwrought and unbelievable. I suspect that normal people in the same situation would spend less time deliberating and more time taking action!
Unfortunately, the characters themselves, although well-realized, are completely unsympathetic, which made it very difficult to feel for any of them. Even the stiff way Harpur's daughters speak seem entirely unconvincing, although maybe this is because I'm unfamiliar with certain British idioms. But if this is British wit then I think I'll stick with the American brand!
Finally, the plot itself still has me a bit confused as to motive.
The really big question here is why so many gifted British mystery writers have such a cynical, cold view of the world these days. Perhaps it relates to what British columnist Jeremy Paxman has to say in his book, "The English" - The English feel they are doomed. "Roses, roses" provides a splendid example of this.
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