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Summary
Summary
In Peter James' You Are Dead , the last words Jamie Ball hears from his fiancée, Logan Somervile, are in a terrified mobile phone call from her. She has just driven into the underground car park beneath the apartment block where they live in Brighton, and seen a man acting strangely. Then she screams and the phone goes dead. The police are on the scene within minutes, but Logan has vanished, leaving behind her neatly parked car and cell phone.
That same afternoon, workmen digging up an old asphalt path in a park in another part of the city, unearth the remains of a young woman in her early twenties, who has probably been dead for 30 years.
At first, to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his Major Crime Team, these two events seem totally unconnected. But then another young woman in Brighton goes missing and another body from the past surfaces. At the same time a strange man visits an eminent London psychiatrist, claiming to have a piece of information on the missing woman, Logan, that turns out, at first, to be wrong-or so it seems. It is only later Roy Grace makes the chilling realization that this one thing is the key toboth the past and the present-and now, beyond any doubt, he knows that Brighton has its first ever serial killer.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of James's superior 11th procedural featuring Det. Supt. Roy Grace (after 2014's Want You Dead), Jamie Ball is talking with his fiancée, Logan Somerville, on his cell phone when he hears her scream. Logan was just pulling into the underground garage of their apartment building in Brighton, England. That same day in Brighton, workers discover a woman's skeleton that was buried more than 30 years earlier under a park's asphalt sidewalk. The new and the old cases appear to be unrelated, until Grace and his Sussex Major Crime Team find a common link in the disappearances of young women through the years. As the detectives deal with the caseload, they also cope with a favorite colleague's death. Despite Roy's second marriage and five-month-old son, he's still haunted by the unsolved 10-year disappearance of Sandy, his first wife, especially when a friend mentions that she may be living in Germany. Carefully crafted, realistic characters make this entry a standout. Agent: Carole Blake, Blake Friedmann Literary (U.K.). (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Spoilsports will grumble that this fat novel is an artful rehash of the same old, same old serial-killer plot. Others will say, So what? it's still a mighty good read. The grumps have a point: the ingredients in the mix are mighty familiar. There's the spooky setup: a young woman drives her car into a badly lit underground garage and disappears. A woman's corpse is unearthed, a cold case is revisited, and the dead women all resemble one another. That's enough to intrigue Brighton Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who carries the usual baggage, including a haunted past and a wife who would like to see more of him. There's even a villain who does everything but twirl his mustache and cackle. But James is a good storyteller, able to mix in proper amounts of mystery and suspense. And he lets secondary characters steal the show. The lovely scene in which an officer tricks a suspect into giving a sample of his DNA by talking about erectile dysfunction is so fine it could have gone on longer. This one is a bit of a mixed bag, then, but James is a genre vet with plenty of appeal for British-procedural fans.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN FICTION, as in life, a violent crime can tear a family apart. In Karin Slaughter's PRETTY GIRLS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $27.99), a hell-raising thriller that departs from her previous soft-boiled investigative procedurals, a murder brings two estranged sisters back together - making them a much better target for a killer who's been stalking the whole family. Claire Scott's pampered existence as the prized wife of a wealthy Atlanta architect comes to a cruel end when her husband, Paul, is fatally stabbed during a mugging. Except for an icky tendency toward extravagant declarations of devotion, Paul seems like an O.K. guy. But when Claire searches his computer for his work files, she's horrified to discover graphic snuff films. And after finding her sister, Lydia, standing over Paul's grave and cursing him, she reconsiders the matter that has kept them apart for 18 years - her refusal to believe Lydia's claim that Paul tried to rape her. The plot perks up once Lydia (whose nickname was "Pepper" back in high school, when she was in a girl band) shows up, with her regret-filled history of too much drugs and liquor and one-night stands, as well as her prickly sense of humor. Hearing her teenage daughter's announcement that she has some bad news, Lydia's first guesses are: "pregnant, failing biology, gambling debts, meth habit, genital warts." And it's Lydia the hellion, not Princess Claire, who's still haunted by the loss of their sister, Julia, abducted during her freshman year of college. But once the sisters bond over those torture-porn videos, Claire takes the lead in exposing her husband's secret life and possibly criminal past. Slaughter executes a number of tricky plot twists, some clever and others preposterous. (Would the F.B.I. really offer witness protection to someone who's a "borderline psychopath"?) But all these sweaty maneuvers are in the service of a genuinely exciting narrative driven by strong-willed female characters who can't wait around until the boys shake the lead out of their shoes. IT'S BEEN AGES since there's been a serial killer in the English city of Brighton, where Peter James sets his fanatically well-researched police procedurals starring Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. They don't know what they're missing - until an authentic specimen comes to this seaside resort in YOU ARE DEAD (Minotaur, $27.99) and begins doing unspeakable things to young women with long dark hair. There's plenty of explicit violence here, as there is in other novels in this series; but that's beside the point. Despite the horrific nature of the crimes, this is no guts-and-gore potboiler, but a meticulous study of police work as it's conducted at the station houses, crime scenes, mortuaries and forensic labs outside the big cities. (Among other fun facts, these cops have to be granted permission for the "use of firearms in a spontaneous incident.") Following the protocol for a good procedural, the narrative dotes on Roy Grace, but it also tracks the work done by other members of the homicide team, like his salt-of-the-earth partner, Detective Inspector Glenn Branson. In that soap opera D.S. Grace calls his life, he's still gaga over his second wife and their new baby, but there's a fascinating development involving the fate of his first wife, long missing and presumed dead. IN THE CHILD GARDEN (Midnight Ink, $24.99), Catriona McPherson draws a warmhearted character study of a woman who stoically copes with the truly awful hand fate has dealt her. Gloria Harkness works in (and lives alone near) the grounds of a nursing home that shelters both her severely handicapped son and the old woman whose generosity makes it possible for Gloria to board him there. But once upon a time the big country house was a private school called Eden - until a pupil died under mysterious circumstances. When an old schoolmate shows up on her doorstep, pursued by a stalker, Gloria takes him in and soon finds herself caught up in that sad, long-ago mystery. McPherson writes with the firm but delicate touch of a spider testing the strength of its web. Her account of what happens when good little children tell big, bad lies is a tale that shivers with suspense and more than a touch of horror. A LOST, FRIGHTENED boy confesses that he has just murdered his foster father, who was abusing his brother. Now what do you do with him? In Stuart Neville's bruising new novel, THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND (Soho Crime, $27.95), 12-year-old Ciaran Devine is sent to a Belfast prison, only to emerge seven years later as the same lost, frightened boy. During those years his older brother, Thomas, has grown into a vicious bully; once they're reunited, he firmly instructs Ciaran to distrust every figure of authority who tries to help him. These people are their enemies, even Paula Cunningham, Ciaran's kind and caring probation officer, and Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan, who knows a child murderer when she sees one and doesn't think Ciaran fits the profile. Neville's books are dark but elegantly written case studies of the roots of violence, and here he writes thoughtfully, even tenderly, about children who come from the streets, go through the foster programs and the prison system, and are either reborn or dragged back into the sorrows that are their inheritance.