Book #19 for 2024: You Are Dead by Peter James
You Are Dead by Peter James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The previous novel in the Roy Grace series featured a number of big events that I won't spoil in this review, so I was excited about how the series would follow this up. Unfortunately, not too well from what I could see from this book.
The premise seems promising; a woman is kidnapped from her home, and the skeleton of another woman is found, with "UR DEAD" branded onto it with an iron. It's one of the grislier premises of the book series, with a large number of women being kidnapped and eventually killed by an unknown perpetrator. My main issue though was that except for a slightly different modus operandi, this felt like something that the series had done before. In this book, a slight twist is added by having a psychiatric patient tell his shrink that he knows about who is doing it, but implying that something bad will happen if he tells the police.
The other issues I had with the main plot were the pacing of the novel; it just felt quite slow-moving, with not a lot happening, and when the killer was finally revealed, they felt almost cheesy - like a cross between Doctor Frankenstein and an Bond villain. I'd not say it was a terrible book, just average.
The book did also include some chapters that dealt with the aftermath of two shocking events from the previous novel, and it was good that they were included, but it wasn't enough to allow for a lot of character development. The later chapters did give more attention to one of the subplots, and advanced one of the main story arcs, in ways that I could not predict. The way it finished will probably have some serious implications for Grace in later titles, so I hope to read the next book soon. I just hope the main plot will be more interesting than the one here.
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