Not Dead Enough [Hardcover]

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

'I loved it.'

'Peter James creates a world we can smell, touch and feel...'
--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

The latest spine-tingling murder case for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace - from the bestselling author of Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead

On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife, he was sixty 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 young Brighton socialite, Katie Bishop. Soon, Grace 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 Grace digs deeper behind the facade of the Bishops’ outwardly respectable lives, it starts to become clear that all is not at all as it first seemed. And then he digs just a little too far, and suddenly the fragile stability of his own troubled, private world is facing destruction . . . Praise for Looking Good Dead: 'James is a master plotter . . . this follow-up to Dead Simple cannot fail to thrill' Daily Mail 'Will have you glued to your deckchair' Observer

Peter James was educated in Charterhouse and then at film school. He lived in North America for a number of years, working as a film-maker, before returning to England. His previous novels have been translated into twenty-six languages. Peter James lives in Sussex and London.