Welcome back to Books With Cause. Let’s dive straight into my latest review.
Technically, this one is Ian Beale’s fault. It was around Covid time when Adam Woodyatt took an extended break from his role of Ian in EastEnders and decided to tread the boards for a bit instead. He starred in a play called Looking Good Dead and it went on tour. When it came to a theatre near me, I had to go and see it. The play was very good, and Woodyatt was good in it too – even if it was like seeing him play Ian Beale in a different context. But it opened a can of worms when I learnt that the play was an adaptation of the second book in an ongoing series of crime novels. Those same novels are currently being adapted into an ITV series starring John Simm – better known to me as The Master during the David Tennant era of Doctor Who.
While I could’ve watched the TV series – and I have seen a couple of episodes – but you know that books are really my bag. So, a couple of years ago, I decided to wade into the series of novels. There are twenty-three at the time of writing this review and still counting. This might well take me some time. On top of that, I have also taken my mum to see two of the other plays that have been adapted from the season: Picture You Dead and Wish You Were Dead, but they come quite a bit later in the series of books.
It’s been a couple of years since I read the first two books – long before I launched this site – so my reviews for those books don’t exist, and I currently have no plans to revisit them. For all intents and purposes, we’ll be jumping in at book three onwards.
Our main character in this series is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who works for the Suffolk Police – predominantly in Brighton and Hove. He’s not the top dog, but he is a big dog. I get the impression that he doesn’t really want to get any more promotions because that would mean more time behind a desk and less time doing detective work. And that sounds fair enough to me. Grace is also a haunted soul. His wife, Sandy, has been missing for almost a decade. She upped and left one day without any explanation. Grace has no clues as to her whereabouts. Nada. And that’s an ongoing subplot throughout the series.
In this specific novel, Not Dead Enough, Grace and his team are tasked with solving the murder of a young woman. Her husband, Brian Bishop, is the prime suspect, and his DNA links him to the scene, but he has a rock-solid alibi for the time of her murder. How could he possibly be in two places at once? Things take a turn when a second woman is found dead a few days later, and she’s a woman that Brian was accused of having an affair with.
Roy Grace has also found himself becoming involved with Cleo Moray, a forensic pathologist whom Grace tends, who had a lot of dealings. Grace is majorly into her, but then he hears from a trusted source that Sandy has been spotted in Munich. Grace is conflicted. He’s really into Cleo, but he wants to know why Sandy left him. Even so he can just have some closure. But will Cleo see things that way? And is Grace spreading himself too thin by trying to find Sandy and solve the Brian Bishop case at the same time?
This is a mammoth book at over 600 pages. But the chapters rarely go longer than about 5 pages, so I found myself absorbing it quite rapidly. Plus, subsequent chapters rarely take place in the same location, so there’s a lot of hopping about, but the pace feels fluid, and Peter James doesn’t allow the time for his readers to even think about getting bored. We’re set up with this premise of “Can one man be in two places at the same time?” and because this isn’t science fiction, we know there will be a logical explanation at the end. And I was hungry to know what that explanation was.
I also particularly enjoyed the interrogation scenes. From what I understand, James has a retired CID detective on hand whom he has befriended and is his go-to and he consults with him on getting the details correct about police procedure. For that reason, I’d presume that the interrogation scenes are accurate to how they would unfold in the real world. I know those are the sorts of details which people don’t tend to like if they’re not realistic.
Despite its length, Not Dead Enough never felt slow. The pacing, the evolving mystery, and the ongoing personal storyline surrounding Roy Grace kept me engaged. With so many books still to come in the series, I’m curious to see how Grace’s story — and the mystery of Sandy — develops.
My Goodreads rating: ★★★★☆ (4 stars)
