NOT DEAD ENOUGH, Peter James

Socialite Katie Bishop drives a BMW and lives in a mansion of a house on Dyke Road Avenue, Brighton, guarded by big wrought iron gates. But wealth, social status and privacy don't protect her when she becomes the target of a murderer while her husband is out playing golf. More than that Katie seems to have been participating in some rather kinky sex before she died.
Brian Bishop is playing a blinder when he is interrupted on the ninth hole by Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson of Sussex CID with the news that at 8.30 that morning his cleaning lady discovered the body of his wife Katie. Back at chez Bishop, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is supervising the scene of the crime.

On the face of it, Brian Bishop was well away from Brighton, in fact in London, at the time his wife was murdered. He had been to dinner in Piccadilly with his financial adviser, and then gone back to his London flat to sleep. Why then doesn't he want to admit that he spent most of the night with Sophie Harrington? Why is Sophie under surveillance? To Roy Grace's team there are things about Brian Bishop that are worth watching.

This is a long novel, but it takes Peter James quite a while to set up all the threads of the main plot. For me the novel moved quite slowly for about the first half, but then it fairly rocketed along, tension building, so you really want to know happens next. And don't worry if you think you have it all sussed out 100 pages from the end - you haven't. For me there were a couple of threads that James didn't quite tie up properly, and a bit of paranormal that I found it hard to swallow, but that didn't reduce my ultimate feeling of satisfaction as most things came together.

There's a lot built into this novel apart from the serial murders being investigated. His wife Sandy disappeared from their house just over nine years ago, on the evening of his 30th birthday. Despite the fact that he is very friendly with the Chief Mortician, Grace is constantly wondering what became of Sandy. These thoughts intrude at moments when he should be focussing on a post mortem or the particulars of a case. He has even consulted psychics in the hope of learning something. Roy Grace comes over as very human, likeable, and just a little bit flawed. And his team think that way too. In the opening pages his Sergeant Glenn Branson turns up on his doorstep when his wife Ari throws him out. His young DC Nick Nicholl is a new parent who is finding the reality of having a baby at home doesn't do much for his sleep. Other members of his team are given chances to show their true worth, even when Grace recognises their short comings. The thing that comes across about Roy Grace above all is that he is prepared to go to bat for what he believes in, and is above all fair to the members of his team. He cares deeply about their welfare.

Two things that I want to remember for a while: Roy Grace's firm belief in a suspect's eye movements revealing their guilt. This is something he is converting his team to believe in. Grace has a love/hate relationship with his ACC Alison Vosper. When there is a stumbling block in the evidence she says "that's the elephant in the room" - wonderful mental picture!

The characters in LOOKING GOOD DEAD are comprehensively drawn, pulling the reader into a fiction that feels a lot like real life. I am looking forward to the 4th title in the series, DEAD MAN's FOOTSTEPS, due out in June 2008.

The Roy Grace series began when Peter James consulted publishers at Pan MacMillan who suggested that he branch out into a detective series. To that point he had been writing thrillers which didn't seem to have much of a market. He decided to set the series in Brighton where he lives, with a central character who is "a bit of an oddball": a missing wife and a belief in the supernatural. I believe he was originally contracted to write a series of 3 novels. The first in the series DEAD SIMPLE (published 2005) has been translated into 28 languages. The second was LOOKING GOOD DEAD (2006).

Peter James' own website is at http://www.peterjames.com/ and contains many of the interviews he has given, articles he has written, his blog, a newsletters, blurbs about all of his books, and extracts from Roy Grace novels.

Check my other posting which was a progress report.

My rating: 4.8

HEARTSICK, Chelsea Cain

Detective Archie Sheridan is famous in Portland as the man who headed the so-called Beauty Killer Task Force, and solved the case two years before, the one where beautiful psychopath Gretchen Lowell was responsible for the deaths over 200 beautiful girls. Because of what Gretchen did to him, physically and mentally, in the ten days she had him, Archie hasn't worked for the last two years. Although Archie is thought to be responsible for Gretchen's eventual capture, he knows that the truth is very different.

Two years on, Archie still thinks about Gretchen every day, and visits her in prison every weekend. His marriage has collapsed although he still loves Debbie, and she him, although she can't share him with Gretchen. Now the city needs him to work again, to head the squad looking for Portland's latest serial killer, the Afterschool Strangler. This time the case will have maximum publicity with a newspaper reporter writing a series of articles about Archie and the case, and accompanying him to crime scenes. Susan Ward, the reporter, has problems of her own, but she is desperately aware of the opportunities this assignment offers.

I feel compelled to warn readers that this novel is very noir - some reviewers have described Gretchen Lowell as the "creepiest serial killer ever".

In HEARTSICK Chelsea Cain has explored not only the make-up of a psychopath, but also the relationship between the serial killer and his/her victim. Archie Sheridan is far from well. Physically he requires extraordinary amounts of pain killers and other drugs to get him through everyday. As the novel develops we are part of not only the investigation into the current disappearances, but also we learn what Gretchen did to Archie in captivity. Not a novel for the squeamish. I'm not squeamish but there was a point when I was wondering if perhaps I'd skip "the next few pages".

This is not Chelsea Cain's first published book, but as far as I can see she's written nothing like this before. On her website at http://www.chelseacain.com/ you can see a short video promo of the book and read an extract. Chelsea Cain says HEARTSICK was inspired by the case of Portland's Green River Killer.

My rating: 4.5

SHARK MUSIC (aka FIND ME), Carol O'Connell

NYPD detective Kathy Mallory has stopped turning up for work and there is a body on the floor of the front room of her apartment. Even Riker, her partner, knows only that Mallory appears to be on the run, travelling west from New York, somewhere on what used to be Route 66. More alarming than the corpse on the floor is the massive list of telephone numbers on the wall of the den. They have lines through them, as if Mallory has been crossing them off. And then 800 miles away, in Chicago, a second corpse has been found. Heavy rain is destroying the scene of crime, washing the evidence away. The body is laid out with its arm pointing down Route 80, saying "Follow Me". And then Mallory turns up at the scene of the crime.

Mallory appears to be following a moving caravan of vehicles travelling the Mother Road, Main Street USA, variously known as Route 66, Route 80, and the I-55. Leading them is psychiatrist Paul Magritte, almost like a patriarch leading a lost tribe, except that the cars contain parents of missing children. These people have been gathered from Magritte’s therapy patients and from internet groups. At each point where the caravan stops the parents post pictures of the lost children. As the caravan gathers media attention, so it also attracts more parents. FBI agents join it as do state troopers and local policemen. Old burials of tiny skeletons are discovered along the roadside, and some of the parents are murdered. Mallory is following an agenda of her own: a wad of letters written by the father she never knew as he too followed Route 66. The quest to find missing children, to apprehend a serial killer, blurs with Mallory’s own quest to find her father.

I need to confess first up that I have read only a couple of earlier titles in O’Connell’s Mallory series. This is #9, and while I knew some of the background about Kathy Mallory, found when she was 6 years old in New York’s Grand Central Station, and fostered by NYPD’s Lou Markowitz, those who have read the series will have more knowledge about the central characters than I did. Trying to piece the book together was rather like a jigsaw begun at the four corners without a clear picture of what the middle would look like. Possibly a less determined reader would have given up, but with my focus on the holy grail of this review, I journeyed on. Things got better in the second half of the book, there were aha! moments, little questions posed to which we needed answers, and then the resolution arrived.

Standing back now, I can appreciate the complexity of what O’Connell has done in SHARK MUSIC. At times the image of this growing caravan crawling along Main Street, carrying with it so much heartbreak, and so many hopes that would never be realised, was almost surreal. Soemtimes it was evocative of the wagon trains of an earlier era rolling west. Overlaying all is the growing tension of the serial murderer trawling the caravan looking for his next victim. The reader is required to juggle a multitude of threads, sift clues, and even pose their own questions. Don’t expect SHARK MUSIC to be a quick read, it needs time.