Book #45: Dead Man's Footsteps by Peter James
Dead Man's Footsteps by Peter James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I felt a little cheated by this book's blurb, which talked of the main protagonist Detective Roy Grace leaving Brighton and jetting off around the world as part of his investigation, which takes up only a small portion of the narrative, and quite close to the end.
I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as some of the previous titles, as it felt a bit too ambitious for its own good, although with ITV adapting the book series for TV with John Simm playing Grace, I'd be interested to see how they handled this one.
The plot starts off feeling like four separate storylines. First off, Grace is called to a crime scene where an old corpse has been unearthed, and he believes it to be the remains of his missing wife Sandy.
In another storyline, a claustrophobic woman called Abby finds herself trapped in a lift, which appears to be the result of sabotage, and worse still, is appears that she has a stalker; the sequences on the lift recall the tense buried alive chapters in Grace's first outing, "Dead Simple".
As well as this, there are several flashbacks to New York on September 11 2001, opening with a man determined to get to a meeting in the twin towers, despite the very obvious terrorist attack taking place. The book paints a vivid description of the chaos that I can only imagine was taking place on that day.
Another set of flashbacks include the discovery of another body in Australia, a month before most of the action takes place.
It was easy to tell that all four storylines would eventually dovetail into each other, and it was just a case of figuring out what was going on as I read, but keeping track of each one was a little exhausting at times, and I'm hoping the later books in the series go back to using a more straightforward narrative format.
There was also a subplot about a detective with a grudge against Grace reopening the case on Sandy's disappearance, and even accusing him of murdering her, although this was not given as much time as it could have.
While this wasn't my favourite in the series so far, I still enjoyed playing the part of armchair detective as I read. Make sure you pay attention to the last chapter, which throws in the most unexpected plot twist so far, setting up a lot of possibilities for later titles.
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