Not Dead Enough

Peter James came to many readers' attention via his immense success as a horror novelist, but his more recent career as a writer of effortlessly ingenious and readable crime novels has - perhaps unfairly -- eclipsed his earlier work. (The author has claimed that he was, in any case, always essentially a crime writer - even in the days of his earlier acclaim).

Not Dead Enough marks another welcome appearance for the author's quirkily characterised policeman Roy Grace (who we've already met in Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead). Here, Grace is investigating the bizarre slaying of a member of Brighton's social elite, Katie Bishop. Her husband, Brian, appears to be in the clear - he was in another town at the time, sound asleep. But Grace begins to suspect the presence of a doppelgänger: is someone else -- nigh-identical to Bishop - involved? As in his previous cases, Grace's diligent exhuming of murky secrets soon demonstrates that the Bishops' outwardly settled lives had darker corners. And as Grace gets close to the truth, he finds - paradoxically - that it's his own beleaguered private life which is on the line.

. With Not Dead Enough, we're soon reminded that Peter James' métier has long been machine-tooled plotting, and that particular skill doesn't desert him here. James himself spends time with the police of the Brighton area (his own beat) and that research is seamlessly freighted into the narrative here.

Readers are confronted with a dizzying variety of tales of murder and deception these days, but this one has an individual strand that marks it out from the crowd. --Barry Forshaw

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Not Clever Enough - Rated
I was so dissappointed with this book. It started off well enough and I thought I was bound to enjoy it but less than half way through I had guessed where it was going. It might have been satisfying to read that I was right had it not taken so long to get to that point. In the end I gave up and turned to the last few chapters to confirm I was right. If you like obvious plots that take too long to reach a climax then this is the book for you- if not avoid it like the plague!

Not Good Enough - Rated
I am a massive fan of all Peter James books. I love detective novels too but wasn't sure they would be upto the Peter James's standard as it was a massive step away to what we are used to but the first two were great and I was looking forward to the third book, this one however left me feeling flat. It just seemed like a total cop-out. There was no suspense, very obvious, no mystery, it trudged! I couldn't believe I was reading a Peter James book. I have recently been re-reading some of my old fav's like, Prophecy, Faith, Possession. They still grab me even though I know what the outcome is, there is a sense of true mastership and in-depth spiritual/occult knowledge an eerieness that stays with you...
I will read the next one but I wish we could have more like the old, no-one comes close to it in my book.

Avoid! - Rated
The things that are wrong with this book:
1) At 610 pages it is FAR too long
2) It's extremely over-descriptive
3) Anyone will be able to guess the 'twist' just by reading the bumpf on the back cover, never mind the actual content
4) Most of the main characters are intensely annoying
However, if you enjoy long-winded, poorly-written books that are mainly about police procedure then you'll love this.

Better Than The First In The Series - Rated
With "Not Dead Enough", Peter James has toned down on the product placements, but not on the coarse sexual references (too much information Peter!).

This third book in the series is more convincingly written than the first, although it is perhaps slightly too long. One example of padding is a paragraph on the story of a book being planned by one of the characters. It centres on aliens landing in Brighton!

Once again, James is strong on police procedure, which clearly shows a lot of careful research.

The book is a about a business man who is accused of killing his partner, but of course the man claims he is innocent.

Like other reviewers, I agree that the twist was pretty obvious from the start, but I disagree with those reviewers who said that the chapters where Grace went to Germany to look for his missing wife were irrelevant. Personally I think he should forget about her!

This outing is a definite improvement in my mind - just get rid of those product placements Peter!

Acceptable as an airplane book. - Rated
Like many readers, I first knew Peter James from his horror novels. I have been reading these Roy Grace detective novels with some interest, although I have to say that I still find myself missing something in his work.

Not Dead Enough spins a tale about a man who is a seemingly obvious murder suspect, if it only were not for the fact that it required him to to be in two places at the same time. The themes of the day are obsession and revenge. It kept me reading, I will give it that much. I do have to say that had I not been on an airplane, the overly complicated plot would most likely have struck me as rather tiresome.

The quality of the writing is good, and I like Roy Grace as a character. I plan to give James the benefit of the doubt and see if I can find something in the series than I like better than Not Dead Enough.

Not bad though, as airplane reading.