Author: Peter James
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum
p78 "...unlit cigarette gripped louchely.." should be "...unlit cigarette gripped loosely..." There is a word 'louche' but it’s not applicable in the context where it’s employed here!
This is yet another novel where the title competes with a dozen others. I ran into an amusing example of this kind of thing on Net Galley. Here are two novels, both released in November 2013, within ten days of one another, both Sci-Fi/Fantasy, both written for adults, both with precisely the same title:
It's not as though the title is a rare one; on the contrary, it's a cliché, and there are two of them right next door to each other and that's just on Net Galley. How many more are already out there in the market? If someone says, "Hey, I read a great sci-fi novel. It's called Into the Fire!" then how in hell are you going to track it down? Common sense should have told these authors not to go with that, but to pick something that isn't a cliché or a trope. The very title dissuaded me from even thinking about asking to read one of these. Just another warning for those of us in the self-publishing business!
This is also the first time I've read a Peter James so, new author, new novel; what can go wrong?!! This novel begins with an attempt on the life of celebrity rock star Gaia Lafayette who of course, wants to be an actress. She's won the rôle of Maria Fitzherbert in an historical drama about British King George 4th and the love of his life. The stalker hates her for this because he wants his struggling actress girlfriend Dana to get that part. Not only does she not get it, the stalker doesn't "get it" because he's a moron and a wack-job, but he's dedicated. Unfortunately, he mistakes Gaia's assistant for Gaia, and shoots her instead. Next we're transported to a chicken farm in southern England....
James has a whole series of Roy Grace novels, of which this is the eighth. All of these novels tediously and predictably have 'dead' in the title. Really? I hope no one confuses him with the "Dead in the Water" Charlaine Harris. He's written novels in other genres, too. One of those also has 'dead' in the title. I wonder if anyone bought that, thinking that it was part of the King Grace series?!
This novel started out interestingly, but as soon as Grace came on the scene, it became far less graceful! It started spinning lines in all directions and completely lost its focus for me. There's far too much going on, and far too many threads, and it detracts from the very thing which the cover blurb trumpets as the focus of the novel! The blurb is all about Gaia and the problem she represents from a policing perspective. That's why I picked up this novel. To start reading it and find out that she represents nothing more than a drab and tiny thread in the rich tapestry of Roy Grace's problematic life panorama was a real downer for me. Hey guess what? I don’t frickin' care about King Grace's epic life! I do care about what the book blurb evidently lied to me was the plot! Yeah, I agree, I'm a moron to actually believe a publisher, so it’s my bad. I can’t help but wonder though: how long do publishers hope to stay in business in this day and age, by lying to the very people who keep them in business?
So here's Grace's baggage: his wife, Sandy, disappeared without warning, and without a trace many years before. He now has a new girlfriend, Cloe, who is pregnant, yet despite claims on both sides of being deeply in love, they're neither married nor talking about it. Cloe discovers one day that her car has been trashed, and a threat to her baby scrawled on the hood (or is that the bonnet?!), yet neither she nor Grace makes an official police report on the vandalism and threat. Grace is put in charge of Gaia's security as she moves to Brighton to begin filming. This is the same Grace who was just put in charge of a major murder investigation (and he wasn't exactly unemployed even prior to that).
I call bullshit on that one. I know that police can multitask, because they have to, but having the same guy who's literally just begun a serious and difficult murder investigation centered around a dismembered torso, also put in charge of a completely different topic and area - music diva security - sounds like purest bullshit to me. I don’t know - I'm far from an expert on British police procedure, and I haven't lived there in years, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t find someone with an uncluttered schedule to be in charge of a high profile star. If they fail to protect her, not only does she die, which is awful enough all by itself, but her child is left an orphan, and the police are going to look like shit in the eyes of the world. I sincerely hope the Brits aren't this incompetent and short-sighted.
I actually wanted to pursue that story (Gaia), not the story of Roy Grace's cluttered life! I don’t care that he's yet another tired, walking cliché spawned from the detective genre. I despise such novels almost as much as I despise first person PoV novels. I realize that James probably had nothing whatsoever to do with his cover, more fool him, but he does have control over what’s between the covers (more or less - he did sell out to "Big Publishing" after all), and that's the problem with character novels, isn’t it? In a series where the story becomes about a character rather than about a plot, how can the story not go downhill? I know authors love them because they require no effort to create, and readers love them because they require no effort to read, but once the character takes over, the plot goes to hell because it’s no longer of any importance; the novel becomes all about that character, and plot be hanged - around the character instead of around something original and intriguing.
Anna Galicia, Gaia's sick "#1 fan" is a really sad joke. Perhaps there are characters like this in real life, but she's written way too extremely to be taken seriously in this fiction. If James was offering this as his first novel, I'd bet that it would be rejected wholesale by publishers as being too amateurish, but because he has a series, he can evidently get away with anything. Well, so can independents! Lol! But that doesn’t mean it's always a good thing. OTOH, I would honestly love to know where Galicia gets her funds from to buy all of her ridiculous Gaia paraphernalia. I can imagine just how many books I could buy with that kind of cash - and new, too, not used - and it makes me sad to see it wasted on what is, in the end, not fandom, but a medical condition! Then maybe my love of books is, too?
Did I mention that Grace is a superintendent? So why then is he going on a visit to a tailor to try and identify a piece of fabric found with the dismembered body? He doesn’t have detectives to whom to delegate such chores?! I know the pathetic cliché is that the detectives are always, without exception, as overworked as your typical Star Trek captain, but if he's so short-handed that he has to make door to door enquiries in person, then how in hell is he going to find time to properly organize and supervise the protection detail for Gaia? And if they're so overworked, why are two of them making this visit instead of just one? This novel doesn't exactly strike me as well thought-out. It seems that James was so obsessed with rendering Grace as a tireless and industrious hero and champion, that he's forsaken all attempts at writing realistic fiction and blown straight through parody and comedy into pure fantasy. Grace doubtlessly has magical powers, and a sword hidden away somewhere with which he has, no doubt, slain dragons.
It’s smart when you're pushing a character (as opposed to a plot in a series like this), to give that character some personal traits, a flaw, a weakness, a hobby, an interest, whatever, but the one thing you don’t want to imbue them with is stupidity (unless, of course, the series is decidedly about a character who's stupid). In a detective series, it seems to me that it’s never a good idea to make your main character look stupid unless she or he is doing it on purpose to mislead someone. So when Grace picks up Smallbone, the career criminal who just got out of jail and who is his main suspect in the trashing of Cleo's car, it's nothing but stupid to antagonize and piss-off the guy. Grace isn’t the one who is threatened here, it’s Cloe, and his actions are the deranged acts of a bully, not a smart cop, and they put the supposed object of his care under greater, not lesser threat.
If Cloe has been threatened, where are Grace's actions designed to protect her? He could be home with her, but instead he chooses to stalk Smallbone, waiting several hours to pick him up late at night, drive him five miles out of town, threaten him, then dump him and leave this sixty-year old lag to walk back home in the pouring rain. Now he's made an enemy where one effectively didn’t exist before. A more restrained confrontation would have been much smarter. And in doing all this he left Cloe alone and unprotected for several hours. This man is a moron. We're repeatedly told how much he cares about her but we never see this reflected in his behavior. Meanwhile the poor pregnant girl who has already been hurried to hospital after a collapse at work is still working (as a pathologist - hardly a desk job) and still ignoring medical advice. I guess she cares as little for her baby as Grace obviously does for her (as judged each by their actions).
We learn of a journalist who apparently has a spy in the police force since he learns of crimes almost as soon as Grace does. There's a reason for this. The journalist has hacked into Grace's Blackberry and is getting the inside track on Grace's phone calls as soon as he makes or receives one! I can’t believe that a senior police detective hasn’t thought to try detecting how this information is leaked! I can’t believe that it didn’t at least cross his mind that his phone was bugged, especially given how fast the journalist discovered the latest news. Again, it's yet another example of Grace's ineptitude. This is hardly a recommendation to read or to keep reading this series.
Well I stuck this out as long as I could, but James insisted on larding it up with one inane issue after another. Not content with merely tossing in the kitchen sink, he wants to include the disgusting antiquated garbage disposal under the sink. As if there aren't enough misfits in play, Grace's long missing wife shows up next with Grace's kid in tow (about which Grace knows nothing) and starts harboring evil thoughts about him and his intended. Is there no son of a bitch in this novel who isn't harboring evil thoughts about some other son of a bitch? Honestly? This novel is unfinished trash, period.
