"Dead Simple" by Peter James

 A crime thriller packed with action.

This is the first of a long series of novels starring Roy Grace, a police officer based on the south coast of England. It's fast-paced (the chapters average five pages) and I read it very quickly because I wanted to finish so I suppose you could say it was a page-turner but I skim read because I wasn't very interested.

There were a number of things that disappointed me:

• I like murder mysteries. There was very little mystery. This was mostly because the narrative head-hops between the points of view of many of the characters so we quickly learn whodunnit.
• Except for the character introduced in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel. To introduce such an important character so late without any foreshadowing seemed to me to break the rules of the genre. It felt like a diabolus ex machina.
• Some reviewers have described it as a police procedural but routine forensic work seems to be jettisoned in favour of action sequences: no-one followed up the soil analysis, nobody bothered to enquire about the land owned by the missing person's property development company. The investigating officer seemed more interested in psychics than science. 
• I didn't feel that a single character had depth. I didn't care about any of them which was perhaps just as well given how many ended up dead. 
• The hero's back story and physical attributes were given in a chunk near the end of chapter three. This felt like I was reading the author's notes but it wasn't quite so clunky as when he did the same thing for the villain near the end of the book.
• Given that it head-hops between multiple points of view, the reader very quickly learns who are the baddies - except for the extra villain brought in by the major twist at about the two-thirds mark - so there is very little mystery about these murders and almost no element of whodunnit. Instead it relies on shocking and sensational writing and short chapters. 
• There was also a significant amount of casual misogyny designed, presumably, to appeal to a mostly male readership. I understand that Roy Grace has been celibate for none years since his wife left him and must be feeling sexually frustrated: given that he seems to remember his wife purely for her bodily attributes I can understand why she went. We meet him in chapter 3 when he is driving to meet a woman he has hooked up with over the internet: "Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers." The next paragraph made me laugh aloud, when Grace's interior monologue described himself as "an old-fashioned romantic". What a bizarre and ridiculous juxtaposition. 
• The misogyny even enters the similes: "A one-armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley." (Ch 73) I'm not sure that works for me on any level.

This tasted like fast-food: rapidly assembled, predictable, unsubtle and easy to consume. I prefer to eat more interesting meals carefully cooked to have depth and complexity.

Selected quotes:

• "Misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative." (Ch 1)
• "Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bed sex is ninety-nine per cent." (Ch 68)

March 2025; 457 pages

Published in 2005 by Macmillan.

My Pan paperback was issued in 2019.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God