Dead Simple

This effort by Peter James has the distinction of being the only book in my library of approximately 10 000 books that I've ever thrown away. One might say I have a psychological aversion to throwing away books, but I was surprised at the ease with which I managed to discard this one. It was just such a canker in my bookshelf, and was beginning to taint the rest with its sheer ineptitude.

It become apparent very quickly that James is a screenwriter rather than a novel writer - the scene construction and the dialogue in the opening pages is far more suited to a visual medium rather than a written one, but even then one is tempted to conclude that it isn't very good. The dialogue especially is simply awful and unrealistic (for example, when was the last time you heard a 20-year old girl say "Vamoosh"!! I doubt if any modern 20-year old knows what Vamoosh means anyway.) It's just horrible.

The sheer amount of product placement is ridiculous also. I can live with being told that a guy drives a Porsche, but I don't need to know the colour and model also. Presumably, James reckon that this tells us more about the character, thereby making his charcters three-dimensional and believable. It doesn't - all it does is describe a lazy writer. By the end of this book we know what each character drives, what kind of telephone they have (and what contract!), what handbag they carry etc etc. It's excruciating, and again, more in keeping with a visual medium.

Plotwise, it starts off well enough, I suppose. Notwithstanding the idiocy attached with the type of prank the lads are playing, I can see it happening. In fact, the exciting force of the plot is pretty decent. However, it's not so much the lack of decent plot that makes this into a shocking novel - it's the disastrous characterization and dialogue that really destroys it. Notwithstanding that, there are a number of plotting howlers that (again) I think are better suited to an episode of A Touch of Frost rather than a crime novel. For example, when the main bad guy who plans the `crime' realizes that all his emails etc may be stored on an external server somewhere, he just shrugs and dismisses it. Clearly, in the real world, the Police would have been onto that within about 5 seconds, but not here; James just lets it rumble on into a bizarre kind of procedural that hits way wide of the mark.

Anyway, as far as the police are concerned, there isn't really a crime to be investigated. A missing person yes, but nothing else. The blurb on the back of this book states "Four Bodies, One Suspect, No Trace", which is incredibly misleading. It's not until about page 200 that the Police realise that there might be a crime in progress, and still later a suspect appears, and even then a suspect for what exactly? The character of the policeman (whose name escapes me less than a week after finishing the book!) is your typical copper with issues and little more than a cardboard copy of many other such coppers. What happens in his life in inconsequential and is just simply `padding'

I could write my own book on why this novel is so bad. However, do yourself a favour and give it a miss. It doesn't even deserve the star that I'm forced to give it in order to write this review.

fast moving (4/4 people found this helpful)

I really enjoyed this book actually enjoyed going to bed to read the next chapter (or 3!) Looking forward to reading some more Peter James.

fab, loved it (4/4 people found this helpful)

This book is the first crime/thriller i have read in a long time.I loved it!!!i was gripped from the very first chapter right till the last.The twists in this book left me gasping out loud.I really enjoyed this book.10/10

Simple Minds (10/16 people found this helpful)

My first go at a Peter James novel and it has left a rather forgettable impression. On the positive side, he has a good imagination for creating a story but his execution was bordering on the amateurish. Among the weaknesses was a frustrating shallowness of characterisation, nobody really stood out as being particularly good, bad or memorable, and everyone seemed to speak with a similar accent - even an Australian sounded the same as the rest.

Somehow I couldn't help feeling that this could have been a whole lot better if the characters had been made to seem truly interesting, or more likeable/dislikeable. The meat and bones of the story was clever enough to make for a memorably dark thriller, but the opportunity was wasted by not enabling the reader to really get inside the hearts and minds of the key characters. There were countless irritating details too - I'm definitely no prude but I found the (thankfully rare) descriptions of sexual activity gratuitous, abhorrent and puerile. It was irritating to see a woman described in the narrative as `seriously attractive' when just `attractive' would have done fine. And as an Autocar subscriber (a car magazine referred to in this book) I was right to query the mentioning of a Land Rover Defender diesel doing 124mph in a car chase; in a road test Autocar clocked it at 99mph max. Do you call that research, Peter? That took me less than two minutes to check up on! And I grew tired of the relentless name-dropping of various consumer products - when someone's mobile phone rang, it had to be an Ericcson phone, on a Vodafone contract. A handbag had to be a Prada, if anyone drove a car it had to be an X5, a TT or a CLK (when just the make would have sufficed) and when a radio scanner fell into the mix we had to be given its full, drawn-out specification so that, presumably, we could better understand how it worked. This is a writer who fails to understand the value of `less is more', that by thinning down details such as these it obliges the mind of the reader to work harder, which usually pays dividends in the form of an enhanced picture of what's going on.

Maybe I'm alone in wishing that central character Roy Grace had been given a different name by his creator? I just could not identify with a male character called Grace, while one of the peripheral police officers was called Allison - and he too was a male. Surely it must have crossed the writer's mind when he was thinking of names that `Grace' might not be the most suitable? Personally I could not get a fleeting image of Sue Johnston out of my mind whenever Grace's name was mentioned (the excellent Sue Johnston played Grace in the BBC drama series Waking the Dead).

Finally there was the predictability of the story's direction. Pretty much everyone who deserved to die did so, likewise the good guys survived. And in the pulsating climax, when the baddies are being chased by a police helicopter, I could only think of one way to escape and hey-presto, I turned the page and that's exactly how they did it. There were simply no surprises, no thrills, no emotions, nothing. It wasn't so bad that I considered not completing it, but it was a pretty lame effort that for the most part a teenager could have composed. I am truly astonished that it has received such accolades here by other readers and reviewers, all I can hope is that they are comparing it with equally plain vanilla non-thrillers and that they will see what I mean if and when they discover better writing standards - prior to reading Dead Simple I read TOKYO by Mo Hayder and more recently THE LINCOLN LAWYER by Michael Connelly, both of which were in a different league and for me immeasurably more entertaining.

Fast-moving and engaging (2/4 people found this helpful)

A stag-night goes horribly wrong when four friends bury the groom as a practical joke and are then killed in a car accident as they travel to the next pub without him. The lead character, Detective Grace, feels suspicious of a fifth friend, who did not attend due to business travels and is a potential beneficiary were the groom to die. He also develops suspicions of others who appear to be behaving somewhat abnormally given what has happened - four deaths and a missing groom. There is more to the plot than this summary but Grace's mission is obviously to locate the groom.

This is a well-developed story which keeps you guessing and James knows how to re-charge your interest just when you think everything is clear or settled. He uses quite some licence to spin this tale and the occasional reliance on the paranormal annoyed me slightly. The close was OK, without being fantastic, but there was some unfinished business which may get attended to in the sequel which I am sure will emerge. Next time round I hope someone spends a little more time proof-reading though! Overall, this was a fast-moving novel, with some great lines, which will have you turning the pages. 9/10

Peter James

Reader Reviews:

Dead Rubbish. (1/1 people found this helpful)

fast moving (4/4 people found this helpful)

fab, loved it (4/4 people found this helpful)

Simple Minds (10/16 people found this helpful)

Fast-moving and engaging (2/4 people found this helpful)

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