Not Dead Enough (Roy Grace, #3)

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

AUDIBLE DESCRIPTION:
Appearances can be deceptive; but the truth is a dangerous thing... On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife he was 60 miles away, asleep in bed at the time. At least that's the way it looks to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who is called in to investigate the kinky slaying of beautiful socialite, Katie Bishop. Roy Grace soon starts coming to the conclusion that Bishop has performed the apparently impossible feat of being in two places at once. Has someone stolen his identity or is he simply a very clever liar? As Roy Grace digs deeper behind the facade of the Bishops' outwardly respectable lives, it becomes clear that everything is not at all as it first seemed. Then he digs just a little too far, and suddenly the fragile stability of his own troubled world is facing destruction... Not Dead Enough is the third best-selling title in the Roy Grace series from the number one best-selling author Peter James.