A review by booksandbark
Dead If You Don't by Peter James
3.0
Actually 2.5/5 stars, but rounding up because life is short
This was a good read, but I’m not sure I’ll be reading the rest of the Roy Grace series. Essentially, a young boy has been kidnapped at the same time a bunch of other strange things are happening in the city of Brighton and Hove—a bomb threat, a dead drug mule, and another dead guy—all linked to the Dervishi crime family. It was a good premise, and Grace seems like a good detective, but there were so many names! Also, the prose was stilted and I didn’t care too much for the characters. It sometimes seemed as if the author cared more about writing a procedural than about writing a novel (this book reads more like a court case brief and less like an actual novel, which was interesting to me but might not be for everyone), and by the end of the book, I barely felt I knew who everyone was let alone what they were like. The POV jumps around A LOT, so it felt less like a “Roy Grace” book and more like a “this is the crime, what happened here” book.
This was probably more accurate than a lot of other crime fiction I read in terms of procedure (in the acknowledgments it’s revealed that Peter James, the author, interviewed a ton of police officers in the Surrey and Sussex PD before writing the book), but that also means that it was really, really long and sometimes got too bogged down in procedure, which made it less engaging.
The publishers provided me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.
This was a good read, but I’m not sure I’ll be reading the rest of the Roy Grace series. Essentially, a young boy has been kidnapped at the same time a bunch of other strange things are happening in the city of Brighton and Hove—a bomb threat, a dead drug mule, and another dead guy—all linked to the Dervishi crime family. It was a good premise, and Grace seems like a good detective, but there were so many names! Also, the prose was stilted and I didn’t care too much for the characters. It sometimes seemed as if the author cared more about writing a procedural than about writing a novel (this book reads more like a court case brief and less like an actual novel, which was interesting to me but might not be for everyone), and by the end of the book, I barely felt I knew who everyone was let alone what they were like. The POV jumps around A LOT, so it felt less like a “Roy Grace” book and more like a “this is the crime, what happened here” book.
Spoiler
Also, the ending wasn’t super resolved from the detective’s POV, and you kind of have to connect the dots yourself as to how all the crimes are related. There’s also no real motive, which is often my favorite part of mystery books.This was probably more accurate than a lot of other crime fiction I read in terms of procedure (in the acknowledgments it’s revealed that Peter James, the author, interviewed a ton of police officers in the Surrey and Sussex PD before writing the book), but that also means that it was really, really long and sometimes got too bogged down in procedure, which made it less engaging.
The publishers provided me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.