Dead at First Sight: Detective Superintendent Roy falls from Grace

Retired Army Major Johnny Fordwater turns up at Gatwick to meet the love of his life, the woman he has spent hundreds of thousands wooing but never met while in Munich Lena Welch is waiting for a man she thinks she has been chatting to online to arrive at her home. She has her suspicions that he might not be all he says he is. In Need You Dead (2017), the thirteenth in the series, James hints that all might not be well with Bruno, the son Grace never knew he had and who has come live with him after the suicide of Sandy, his mother and Grace’s wife who vanished ten years earlier.

Is he a sadist who, we fear, will take out his frustration on Humphrey, the Grace family dog?

The question remained unanswered in Dead If You Don’t (2018) but in this book, Bruno is back and returns to form with his odd behaviour.

Is the boy just finding it difficult to settle in his new home or is there more to it?

An incident involving other children seems to provide an answer – and not one that Grace likes.

Talking of sadists, an old Grace adversary returns in this book, one he – and we – thought was dead.

Another theme running through the series is the banter between Grace and his fellow cop and best friend Glenn Branson but that is also, for the most part, missing from the book.

Also making just a brief appearance are Norman Potting’s politically incorrect views.

DS Potting is no longer sporting a combover but he, like the equally shaven-headed Branson, doesn’t play a major role in the book.

Peter James is meticulous in his research but on occasion veers into political correctness – he has written of “male police officers in uniform” when surely the much simpler “uniformed policemen” would suffice – and I don’t understand why he refers to the police and their “civilian aides”.

The police are civilians. 

The author is a terrific writer who can tell a story as his sales attest but the last three books in this series are lacking the impact of the earlier ones.

The tension is missing, it seems he is, dare I say, going through the motions.

In Dead At First Sight the villains are shallow stereotypes, none instil a fear in you.

You wouldn’t like to bump into them in the street but that’s true of almost every criminal – fictional or factual.

These are one-dimensional caricatures.

Three times, fellow crime author Mark Billingham has taken a year off from producing an annual Tom Thorne thriller and returned more strongly.

Is it perhaps time to rest Roy Grace in 2020 and return with a revived Roy in 2021?

Source: Read Full Article