Book #35 for 2024: Love You Dead by Peter James
This one is hard to review without spoilers, so...
[Major spoilers behind the cut]
Love You Dead by Peter James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The twelfth book in the Roy Grace series opens with a woman named Jodie losing her husband in an apparent skiiing accident. As often is the case, the audience is left a few steps ahead of Grace, as it becomes apparent that Jodie is a black widow (and a gold digger).
In the first few hundred pages, Jodie has married another husband, an elderly rich man, who she eventually kills, and she has also stolen a memory stick. She also owns a lot of snakes, which end up being involved in some of the deaths, including that of a petty criminal quite early on.
The book has a number of flashbacks involving Jodie being jealous of her sister's appearance when they were kids. Her sister is revealed to be dead, and it is easy to guess that Jodie was the killer.
Things get more complicated when the hitman Tooth (from one of the previous titles) starts hunting down the oblivious Jodie in order to retrieve the memory stick she has stolen.
Roy Grace doesn't really get that much to do in this book; he hardly appears for the first hundred or so pages, which are mostly about setting the scene with the Jodie/Tooth plotlines, and later on the book focuses on Norman Potting, who is disguised as a rich elderly suitor for Jodie.
The book also continues the story involving Sandy, who is in hospital. Grace previously visited her and didn't believe it was her, but this time he is given proof of who she is, and even brings his wife Cleo to visit her. Sandy doesn't feature heavily, but the book deals an emotional blow by killing her off at the end, and event that I'd suspected was inevitable.
I would have easily given this book four stars, but I had a few issues with it. They did seem to repeat a gimmick, which involved someone stealing a car, and setting off a bomb that was intended for its owner (in this case, Tooth has sabotaged Jodie's car). I sensed that there were a lot of hanging threads that weren't resolved, and which I can only hope will be followed up on later. The contents of the book's McGuffin, the memory stick, are never revealed, and also I was unsure of the reason why the previous title's villain, Dr. Edward Crisp appeared, except as a plot device to have him rearrested.
I was also surprised by Cleo's restrained reaction to finding out that Grace has accidentally committed bigamy by marrying her, but at least the conclusion of the Sandy plotline sets up some of the plot for later books, mostly involving her German son Bruno and his parentage.
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