BOOK REVIEW - FOLLOW YOU HOME MARK EDWARDS

HERE TO STAY BY MARK EDWARDS

 I really enjoyed this book - reading it over two nights last week and being dragged in by the story. The author, Mark Edwards started out self publishing his work to sales that most other self pubbers can only dream of, but he was soon snapped up by Amazon's publishing company,Thomas and Mercer. And now with sales in the millions he's managed to build up a strong and loyal readership.

The plot here concerns a young man named Elliot who seems to have found the perfect wife in Gemma but when her parents and young sister come to stay Elliot soon discovers that he has the in-laws from hell. 

It soon becomes clear to Elliot that his in-laws have no intention of leaving, and when he starts to dig into their past he realises that he is in very real danger. The book works so well, because it is excellently paced with the author drip feeding the reader as the pages turn. There's a pretty nifty twist at the end, and although I'd begun to suspect this before the big reveal it was none the less satisfying.

An highly accomplished slice of domestic noir.                                                                

The Next Victim by Helen H. Durrant: Book Review

 This book, the first to feature DCI Rachel King, hits the ground running by given us the killer's point of view quite early in the narrative while opening up the world  the characters inhabit around the tightly constructed plot. Of course the nucleus of the story is the life of Detective Rachel King, late Thirties, divorced (fictional lead detectives usually are), two teenage children and an hectic work and home life balance. Add to this the fact that Rachel is still very much in love with (even if she doesn't want to admit it to herself) an old flame who just happens to be a notorious gangster, and you have a heady mix indeed.

This last element added a lot to the character of Rachel and promises much for later books in the series. It really is an intriguing aspect to the premise and when Rachel and Mr gangster team up towards the end of the book this offers an original twist on that old chestnut; the ill-matched pair. It's more Hart to Corleone than Hart to Hart. Although joking aside, this part of the plot works really well, is handled with panache and seems perfectly natural to the story that the author tells. In fact, it left me eager to get into the second book in the series and find where this relationship will go next.

The blurb -

A young man’s body is found burnt and tortured by a Manchester canal.

Detective Rachel King investigates. But she has a secret, the love of her life is a well-known villain. He has recently come back on the scene. But what does he really want?

A brutal serial killer with a taste for good-looking young blonde men.

A student who believes she has a lost brother. But even her own father doesn’t believe her. 

Helen H. Durrant

The Next Victim is one of those books that grips the reader very early on and I found myself rooting for the main character and becoming invested in her messier than messy private life, while she tried to juggle a heavy work load and stop a serial killer. All of the characters ring true and the pacing of the story is faultless with events happening naturally in the narrative and carrying the reader hurtling towards the final denouncement with that twist, that to be honest I'd figured out by the last quarter of the story but nevertheless kept me enthralled.

An excellent book.

Available in eBook, print and audio versions.

Book Review: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

I've read several Cornwell books over the years, but the historical fiction genre is something that I only dip into from time to time - in fact, I think the last book I read by this author was Stonehenge which I remember really enjoying and so looking for a change of pace I picked up The Last Kingdom from my TBR pile.

I knew nothing of the BBC TV series when I picked up the book (though I this last few weeks binged watched all three seasons) and I'm kind of glad since the story came to me fresh - or at least as fresh as a story so heavily based on actual historic events can be. After all, we learned all about Alfred the Great and the Saxons at school, so I had a basic knowledge of the period and the established facts. However after reading the book you have the sense of having been there, for whilst you travel between the covers you are indeed transported to Wessex, Mercia and beyond.

And that, I think, is  Cornwell's biggest talent - he holds an  immense skill in creating readable stories, and pushing his  research and knowledge into the background so that the action drags the reader into this world. Before  you know it you are completely enthralled in the world of the books and it's as if you are there in Wessex, experiencing the day to day life of the characters. So faithfully does the author transport you to a time and place that the reader might as well have been issued with a passport - that 9th Century England stamp will sure stand out between the stamps for two weeks in Ibiza, during which I dined that fat bird while the warm sea breeze blew through our hair three years ago,  and next year's trip to the States when I, no doubt will entertain an equally voluptuous bird or two. Hey, I'm nothing if not an optimist.

'I am Ulthred son of Ulthred.'

The book starts in the year 866 with Ulthred, then still called Osbert. He is, at this point nine-years-old and it is his older brother who took his father's name. During the day the elder brother is killed by Danes and so Osbert becomes Ulthred. The story then moves forward until almost a year later when Ulthred is almost ten years old and find himself going to war for for the first time.


'That was the year 867, and it was the first time I went to war. And I have never ceased,'

Young Ulthred expects to fight in the shield wall but he is told by his father that he will not, he is told that he will watch and he will learn, and throughout the book the shield wall becomes something of a metaphor for the journey to manhood. For although Ulthred faces and overcomes considerable dangers throughout the story it is not until he finally fights in a shield wall in the closing sections of the book that he truly considers himself a warrior. But it is during his first experience of war that his father and their fyrd are completely wiped out, and he is taken away by the Danes.

Ulthred is at first treated like just another slave but soon he gains a new father in the Dane, Ragnar who treats his well and as the years pass, the young grows towards adulthood and begins to consider himself more Dane than Saxon. However Ulthred will soon follow his destiny and end up serving King Alfred in his many battles against the Danes as the visionary Saxon King sets about the long task of achieving a unified England.

The author uses many of the events depicted in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles to give his series a sense of reality, buy he is constantly aware of the need to tell a good yarn, to keep the reader turning the pages and he does this so well - as a writer myself, I'm envious of the author's talent in delivering a house-brick of a book that doesn't outstay its welcome, and indeed leaves the reader eager for more.

Apparently this series of books has only recently been re-named the Last Kingdom series because of the success of the TV series - they were originally published under the collective: The Warrior series, and as soon as I closed the covers on The Last Kingdom, I immediately turned the first page of the second book in the series, The Pale Horseman so expect a review soon.

Book Review: The Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

After recently reading and loving the novel, Little Big Man I had to dive straight into the sequel, which was originally published back in 1999 - It turns out that Jack Crabb faked his death at the end of the Little Big Man novel in order to get rid of that pesky journalist, and now he's back, at 112 years of age to narrate the rest of his story into one of those new tape recording machines. And the book, like its predecessor is an absolute delight.

"I had had my own grievance against Custer, whose attack on the Cheyenne camp on the Washita, years earlier, had resulted in the loss of my Indian wife and child, and thought for a while I'd kill him if I could, but I never got the chance, and now that somebody had done it with no help from me, I both lacked a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of purpose as to what I'd do with the rest of my life."

-- from the first chapter of 'The Return of Little Big Man'

Narrated of course in the first person; a chatty style as if Crabb is narrating his story onto tape for future generations, and the end of this one is absolutely excellent and both definitively finishes the story, while somehow leaving it open for yet another volume. Though with the author having died, Patrick Bergar that is not Jack Crabb at the young age of 89 back in 2014 it seems that the story is now over.

Once again Jack is as hand to witness historic events in the old West - Hickock's murder, of which Crabb sees himself as responsible, the gunfight at,, or rather close to the OK Corral and the murder of his good friend Sitting Bull by reservation police in 1890. He's also at hand when Queen Victoria comes out of a quarter of a century mourning to see Buffalo Bill's Wild West Circus, of which Jack is a part. Other historical figures come in and out of the book - Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Bat Masterton and Libby Custer to name but a few.

I loved this book and found it even better than Little Big Man - this time Jack's wanderings take him over a far larger canvas and the comedy is far broader, though never slapstick and always believable. For instance once scene in which Jack buries his beloved dog, Pard is absolutely heartbreaking but suddenly becomes insanely hilarious when the dog, very much alive and having dug itself out of its early grave, comes padding up to him. I won't give away the details of this scene but I will say that it works so well that, I think I shed a tear at the death of the pouch. I know I laughed out loud when it was revealed that he hadn't been dead  but......well, I won't give it away but will say that Pard doesn't seem to harbour any ill feelings to his adopted master for having prematurely buried him.

There are so many other highlights in this superbly crafted story - I've only ever read two Bergers books, this one and the volume that came before, but he seems to me as a kind of Mark Twain for the modern age. I guess I'm going to have to check out his other books.

Book Review: Little Big Man by Patrick Berger

I first came into contact with Little Big Man via the Arthur Penn 1970 movie - that film is something of a revisionist western and is generally considered a classic movie. I love the film myself but after finally getting around to reading the source novel, the movie has been somewhat diminished for me and I consider the novel to be vastly superior.

 I  can't understand why the movie changed the story somewhat; expanded the role of the character, Mrs Pendrake for instance. I suppose it was to give Faye Dunway more to do in the picture but it takes away from the depth of the story when later in the movie, Jack Crabb discovers her working as a prostitute, when in the novel this particular story-line was given to a character who Jack mistook for a long lost niece, and promptly spends much of his energy on earning the money to get her schooled properly, to turn her into a woman like Mrs Pendrake. This section of what is an epic story is far more powerful in the novel than in the movie, and is perhaps the biggest change from book to screen. Maybe if a lesser actress had been cast in the role then she would have been given a  smaller, though pivotal role in proceedings.

Though it is true that whilst Mrs Pendrake is far more of a secondary character in the novel,  her influence on Jack Crabb is felt throughout his life, particularly in the way he places women, or at least those who, he considers to be proper women,on a pedestal. For Jack Mrs Pendrake represents the perfect woman, and she often comes into his thoughts when he has dealings with those of the opposite sex.

The novel is famous for mixing in fact with fiction, and for the way Jack Crabb interacts with actual historical figures throughout his story, and the main ones throughout the narrative are Wild Bill Hickok and General Custer, though Jack also comes into contact with a young Wyatt Earp, though his brief interaction with Earp was for some reason not used in the movie. Still, that I can understand since Earp doesn't really have that much to do with where the narrative is heading and that's to show how Jack Crabb became the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Big-Horn. Though western readers will know that it was Wild Bill Williams who was actually the only white survivor of the battle - check out Wild Bill Williams by Jack Martin for the lowdown on that.

The basic premise, both movie and novel, are virtually identical - the story is told by Jack Crabb, more than a hundred years old at the start of the book, and takes us through a history of the period known as the Wild West. As a young boy Jack saw most of family slaughtered by the Cheyenne Indians and he is carried away and brought up by the tribe. Later he is brought back to white civilisation and adopted by the Pendrake family, only to leave again when he discovers that the supposedly prim and proper Mrs Pendrake is actually a bit of a wild eyed slut whenever she gets the chance. From there Jack moves back and forth between Indian and white culture as an entertaining, often thrilling as well as humorous story moves towards the demise of Custer and the beginning of the end for the Indian way of life. Jack's various times with the Cheyenne throughout the story really drives the narrative and are by far the best parts of the book. The Indians call themselves the Human Beings and look down with puzzlement at the whites who they see as being vulgar and  infantile with no understanding of the centre of the world.

Larry McMurtry in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book called it, 'An American masterpiece. Up there with Twain and Hemingway'

Who am I to argue with that?

An excellent tall tale......

Book Review: Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz....so 007 is dead!

'So 007 is dead,'

I reviewed the first Horowitz Bond novel, Trigger Mortis CLICK HERE, and looking back at that review it seems the only thing I wasn't enamoured with was the title itself. Trigger Mortis -  it just didn't sound Bondian. There have been some great titles used for the Bond continuation novels over the years, and of course some not so good, and whilst Trigger Mortis was not, to my mind, the worse title (that distinction belongs to John Gardner's execrably titled, No Deals, Mr Bond) it just didn't have that touch of class, that magical ring to it. We're talking titles here mind -  not the books themselves because Gardner's No Deals, Mr Bond is ironically one of his best Bond novels and Mr Horowitz's first Bond novel was bloody wonderful.

On a side note -  John Gardner was revealed to not be happy with the title, No Deals Mr Bond and wanted to title the book, Tomorrow Always Comes but the estate wouldn't go with it and so No Deals, Mr Bond was settled on. It could have so much worse and Bond Fights Back and Oh No Mr Bond were also suggested.

Thankfully Horowitz was asked by the Fleming estate to pen a second Bond novel and this time the title itself is pure Bond - Forever and a Day. The novel itself also carries on in the same assured style as the previous Horowitz title. There's a lot of the Bond formula used in the story - the meeting with M, the high stake gambling, the larger than life villain, the torture scene, the snobbery towards food and wine, but because this book takes place before Casino Royale, the first Fleming novel,  and because Horowitz delivers this deceit with such proficiency, it feels almost as if the well worn formula is actually being invented here.  There are some nice touches too throughout the book - we learn the origin of why Bond likes his drinks, 'shaken and not stirred', and why he smokes a certain type of cigarette. There are other little nods for Fleming fans too but I'll leave you to discover them.

The book opens with M delivering the line, 'So 007 is dead.' And this time it's not a twist that will reveal 007's death was staged in order to go deep undercover. No, this time 007 really is dead - shot three times whilst operating in the South of France. It seems another agent carried the 007 number before Bond, and this book tells the story of how Bond replaced him, became the new 007 and also avenged his death. This all takes place before the events in the actual first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. This makes this book a prequel to the series, and as such I think it's very good.

The fact that Horowitz is able to set his Bond novels in the time frame where he belongs, an era when political correctness had yet to show it's ugly head gives him a massive advantage over some of the other Bond continuation authors. The novels that have Bond set in the modern day have always seemed more like the film Bond than Fleming's creation, and it is Fleming who Horowitz is reaching for here. As good as the Bond novels of say John Gardner and Raymond Benson were, and sometimes they were very good, you can't help thinking that they would have been so much better had they been set in the 1950's/1960's like Fleming's original canon. Still, I believe that was down to rules set by the Fleming estate rather than the authors themselves.  I wrote to John Gardner when his first Bond novel, Licence Renewed came out and I still have his reply in my scrap book and he more or less confirmed this.

There are one or two problems with the story in that the MKII Bentley Continental mentioned early in the story didn't actually exist at the time the story is set, but then Fleming often messed up his cars in the original books, so maybe that's the point. It does though seem an oversight that there is no mention of the 4 litre supercharged Bentley that Fleming said Bond drove during the early books, and had owned since 1933. Then again, now many people would actually pick up on this and as I say Fleming made all kinds of mistakes - perhaps the most famous being in his original choice of guns for his superspy. In 1956 a fan letter sent to Fleming by a Major Boothroyd  convinced the author that the Beretta was a ladies gun and that a jobbing secret agent would be much better armed with a Walther PPK.

'I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.' Extract from the letter to Fleming from Major Boothroyd.

Fleming's reply was:

Dear Mr Boothroyd,
I really am most grateful for your splendid letter of May 23rd.

You have entirely convinced me and I propose, perhaps not in the next volume of James Bond’s memoirs but, in the subsequent one, to change his weapons in accordance with your instructions.
Since I am not in the habit of stealing another man’s expertise, I shall ask you in due course to accept remuneration for your most valuable technical aid.

Incidentally, can you suggest where I can see a .38 Airweight in London. Who would have one?
As a matter of interest, how do you come to know so much about these things? I was delighted with the photographs and greatly impressed by them. If ever there is talk of making films of some of James Bond’s stories in due course, I shall suggest to the company concerned that they might like to consult you on some technical aspects. But they may not take my advice, so please do not set too much store by this suggestion.

Gun expert and fan: Major Boothroyd

From the style of your writing it occurs to me that you may have written books or articles on these subjects. Is that so?

Bond has always admitted to me that the .25 Beretta was not a stopping gun, and he places much more reliance on his accuracy with it than in any particular qualities of the gun itself. As you know, one gets used to a gun and it may take some time for him to settle down with the Smith and Wesson. But I think M. should advise him to make a change; as also in the case of the .357 Magnum.

He also agrees to give a fair trial to the Bern Martin holster, but he is inclined to favour something a little more casual and less bulky. The well-worn chamois leather pouch under his left arm has become almost a part of his clothes and he will be loath to make a change though, here again, M. may intervene.

At the present moment Bond is particularly anxious for expertise on the weapons likely to be carried by Russian agents and I wonder if you have any information on this.
As Bond’s biographer I am most anxious to see that he lives as long as possible and I shall be most grateful for any further technical advices you might like me to pass on to him.
Again, with very sincere thanks for your extremely helpful and workmanlike letter.
Yours sincerely

4½ litre supercharged Bentley

Read more https://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/james-bond-books/forever-and-a-day/review-forever-and-a-day-by-anthony-horowitz.htm

4½ litre supercharged Bentley

Read more https://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/james-bond-books/forever-and-a-day/review-forever-and-a-day-by-anthony-horowitz.htm

Bentley Continental mentioned early in the book too. Ian Fleming also messed up Bond’s cars, so maybe that is the point.

Read more https://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/james-bond-books/forever-and-a-day/review-forever-and-a-day-by-anthony-horowitz.htm

Bentley Continental mentioned early in the book too. Ian Fleming also messed up Bond’s cars, so maybe that is the point.

Read more https://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/james-bond-books/forever-and-a-day/review-forever-and-a-day-by-anthony-horowitz.htm

Fleming did indeed take Boothroyd's advice and as a thank you he introduced the character of Major Boothroyd in the sixth Bond novel, Dr No. The character would go onto become the much loved, Q.

But back to Forever and a Day - Horowitz has written another great Bond novel with an absolutely shocking climax - well, epilogue really since the huge set piece that would  usually be considered the climax comes a little earlier. I do hope Horowitz does a third Bond novel, and that should tell you all you need to know about, Forever and a Day.

Book Review: The Guns of Navarone by Alistair Maclean

Alistar Maclean
First published 1957
The Kindle Edition

Recently watching the Guns of Navarone on television,  I suddenly thought that I'd never read the book on which the quite excellent movie was based - with that thought came the realisation that I'd never read any Alistair Maclean books. Of course I knew of the author; he remains, even now several decades after his death, a household name and I've seen a few of the many films based on his work. But the urge to actually dip into the master thriller writer's work was intense, I figured that he had to be pretty damn special given his reputation and so I promptly bought the eBook edition of the Guns of Navarone - at £1.49 it was hardly going to break the bank.

So first for anyone that doesn't know here is the plot of this wartime adventure -  There are more than a thousand British soldiers trapped on a small island off the Aegean island of Navarone, and the Germans are sending a huge force to smash them.  The British Navy wants to pull them off, but the only route that can be taken goes right past–the guns of Navarone.  Unfortunately neither sea nor air attacks will work on the Navarone fortress due to its unique position, and a mass amphibious assault is too chancy and likely doomed to failure. But a small team of specialists, led by renowned mountain climber, Keith Mallory, might be able to scale the seemingly unclimable cliffs, get past the elite Alpenkorps troops, infiltrate

Various editions of the novel

the impenetrable fortress and blow up the invincible guns

Maclean's style took me a little while to get into - he was a very detailed writer and the book is paced a little slower than the modern thrillers I am used to reading. However once I'd gone a few pages I found myself sucked into the story, and the suspense kept me turning the pages. I also appreciated the fact that the German characters in the book are not presented as one dimensional bad guys, but rather with respect - they are for the most part just soldiers fighting for their country, just like our intrepid heroes themselves. There is one nasty German character, who engages in a little torture at a pivotal part in the book but he is an exception to the rule, and overall the books comes across with a very realistic feel. The rock climbing scenes are brilliantly well done - incredibly described and in this respect the author reminded me somewhat of Ian Fleming; he was another writer who could squeeze excitement out of scenes such as this. When reading the exploits of Mallory and his team as they scale the seemingly impossible cliffs, we can feel the wind in our hair, the ice cold rain washing down out faces and you get a real sense of the danger in which our characters find themselves. I even think I had an attack of vertigo at one or two points in the book.

Maclean

The titular guns themselves almost take on a mythical status throughout the narrative - fitting that the book is set on a Greek island since the guns have the air of a Greek Myth - and it is surprising that their actual destruction is dealt with in a couple of pages, but the fun of the book is getting to this point and it really is a pulse pounding journey - very well told with a masterful grip of character. I'll certainly be exploring more of Maclean's work - it took me awhile to get here but this book leaves me well and truly a fan.

An exceptional thriller that deserves its lofty reputation.

BOOK REVIEW: Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer

This is the first book I've read by the author, and it certainly won't be the last. I heard the author talking about the book on Mark Billingham's excellent podcast, A Stab in the Dark. And the fact that the book was set in an area that I knew really well, prompted me to take a trip up the Amazon and click my way into getting the book on the Kindle.

What followed was several hours of getting sucked into the story - I finished the book over two evenings, the best part of a bottle of Penderyn and a packet or two of Doritoes.

The story is largely told using three concurrent story-lines - one of the narrators is a man in a coma following a crash on the A470 (Believe me that can be a bugger of a road), a self obsessed nurse called Tracy and the main character, Patrick. Though it is Patrick, a young man suffering from Aspergers, who really carries the book through. Personally I know next to nothing about Aspergers Syndrome but the character of Patrick really came alive in the story and I was left feeling that I had a better understanding of the condition.

What is interesting, and no doubt testament to the author's skill, is that Patrick is such an emotionless character, and yet he evokes empathy and a genuine affection from the reader.  He stands apart from everyone else - the only thing akin to love he ever really knew was his relationship with his now dead father, while his exasperated mother seems if not to hate him, then at least to find him intolerable. Her feelings are perfectly understandable in the context of the story, but then her reasons may be far more complex than they seem on the surface.

Patrick is an anatomy student and whilst dissecting a corpse, known as Number 19, he finds something that leads him to believe the man has been murdered. And this is the main thrust of the novel - Rubbernecker is a thriller with very little violence but plenty of scenes that will have the reader squirming. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed this book and immediately bought another by the same author (Black Lands) upon turning the final page.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a compelling, intelligent thriller and would liken the author's style to the psychological thrillers Ruth Rendell used to produce alongside her more traditional Wexford thrillers.

Quite brilliant.

Looking Good Dead - Peter James book review.

Looking Good Dead is the second in Peter James' Roy Grace series and after enjoying the first book, Dead Simple I jumped straight into this novel. The plot this time around is high concept - snuff movies. It all kicks off when Tom Bryce finds someone had left a CD on the train and when he later puts it into his own computer he finds himself watching a brutal murder. Shortly afterwards some virus hidden amongst the coding of the snuff movie wipes Tom's hard drive clean but not before warning him against going to the police. However Tom is persuaded by his wife to report the movie and when he does all hell breaks loose - this culminates in Tom and his wife being kidnapped in order to be the lead actors in a forthcoming snuff movie.

The author uses the same TICKING CLOCK device to create tension in this novel as he used so memorably in the previous book in the series. In the earlier novel a character was buried alive in a coffin and the suspense was driven by the fact that he had to be found before he died. And this time around the author  has two characters kidnapped - the clock is ticking for these characters with the reader aware that they are soon to be killed as part of a snuff movie. Will the police find them in time? It's all very effective and marks this book out as a crime thriller rather than a traditional whodunnit. The reader know what is happening all along, but the police of course are clueless and simply blunder around while the story plays itself out.

I enjoyed the previous book, see my review HERE and this second book in the series improves on that book with the central character of Detective Roy Grace now fully formed and becoming something of a tragic man - there's a sadness, a desperation about him.

 I'm certainly going to read more books in this series - Dead good, that was.

Dead Simple = dead good. Peter James book review.

Dead Simple (2005) is the first in the hugely popular DS Roy Grace series from Peter James - when I picked up this book earlier this week I was coming to the series fresh. I had read Peter James before, I even interviewed the author for Samhain Magazine but that was back in the day when the author was known for his horror/supernatural novels.

Dead Simple then is the author's first crime novel though he doesn't leave his supernatural roots behind entirely, and there is some malarkey in this novel involving a psychic who Roy Grace consults in order to locate dead bodies, missing persons and his car keys. His acceptance in the supernatural often gets him into trouble with his superiors, the judiciary and the media. To be brutally honest I did find this element of the story to be slightly ridiculous but that's a small gripe given how genuinely gripping this book is.

Dead Simple which has been adapted into a stage play, and is being mooted for possible TV adaptation, is structured more like a thriller than a standard crime novel. It doesn't take the whodunnit route since the reader is drip fed information throughout the story and is always one step ahead of the police. Though the author  manages at several key moments to twist the story in ways totally unexpected, which leaves the reader squirming in glorious anticipation of what happens next.

The plot goes: A  stag night prank of burying the groom in a coffin by his mates. If this seems a pretty extreme prank, (I mean what's wrong with stripping the groom naked and tying him to a lamppost in the town centre? Or shaving his bollocks and tattooing a smiley face on his manhood?) then it all makes sense when James explains the history that leads to this event. The macabre prank becomes plausible enough to stick with it.  However the first of many twists comes when  the perpetrators are killed in an horrific traffic accident  - this leaves our man trapped in the coffin. We soon learn that one person knows of the coffin prank but it seems he has a lot to gain by leaving the man there.  This is where the twists start but the plot does remain credible within the confines of the world here. And speaking of confines, some of the coffin scenes really are genuinely claustrophobic to read.

It's a page turner, folks and although it often strays dangerously close to B-movie shenanigans it does manage to keep itself on track for an excellent climax. If there was a problem with the story it was the author's decision to suddenly pull a key character out of nowhere towards the end of the book- a character who largely drives the book towards the breathtaking climax involving a car chase that could put Bullitt (a movie actually referenced by a film buff cop in the plot) to shame. The author is a skilled storyteller and skills learned when he was a scriptwriter serves him well in keeping the incredibly impressive pace of the narrative.

Peter James arrested for dealing in highly addictive fiction

The book did leave some questions hanging for me - Why don't the police ever check emails? At least five  of the characters would have sent or received emails containing the exact details of where the coffin was. Why don't the police make any real effort to work out where the coffin could be? Such as, maybe, an empty plot of land owned by the main characters, a plot of land that's right by one of the pubs they went to. These questions were racing through my mind but the plotting is so incredibly well done, the pacing so exciting, that the story hooked me entirely and I couldn't put the damn book down.

Of course a crime series such as this is largely dependent on creating an interesting main character - for it is this character who will carry the series from one book to another. So what of Roy Grace? Well Peter James gives as a cop who is not as dour as John Rebus, nor as earthy as Tom Thorne. There is a sadness surrounding Roy Grace, who comes across as a likeable and ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary situations. The reader learns that his wife went missing some years back, no one knows what has happened to her and no doubt this element of Roy Grace's past will become important as the series progresses. The disappearance of his wife (their marriage is portrayed as having been idyllic) haunts the policeman and is largely responsible for his penchant to turn to psychics in order to help in solving crimes

I will be reading more in this series - in fact I'm going to start the second book,  Looking Good Dead, today - I will be interested in seeing where the character goes and if psychic malarkey continues throughout the series.

All in all Dead Simple was an excellent, tighly plotted crime thriller....I bloody enjoyed that. Dead good, it was.

Find Peter James HERE

Book Review - Wilt by Tom Sharpe

First published 1976
Version read: Kindle edition

I first read this book many many years ago when I was in my mid-teens, and I remember loving it. I decided to revisit it as an adult but was slightly dubious. Would it be as good as I remembered?

 To be honest it was even better - most of the humour is broad enough for even a teenage reader to enjoy but there's a sophistication here that must have gone over my head years ago. I think with this re-reading I got more out the book. It had me laughing like a loon several times and my heart was totally taken by Henry Wilt, the downtrodden everyman who manages to stand up to and best the establishment after a comical series of events culminate in him being arrested for a murder he didn't commit.

 Several scenes are genuinely side-splitting - the section where the inflatable doll (with a vagina!) is pulled from the concrete filled tomb had me roaring and I had to look around several times in embarresment. I was reading the book while parked up in Tesco's carpark and people passing must have thought that I had lost my mind as I sat there  screaming with uncontrollable laughter. The highlight of the book for me, were the interrogation scenes between Henry Wilt and the non nonsense policeman, Inspector Flint. These scenes are a masterclass in comedic writing and are among the best written comedy I have ever read. Inspector Flint starts out in control but gradually Wilt turns the tables, and it is the policeman who ends up being worn down as the tables are turned on his interrigation. In face Wilt takes strength from the constant police attacks and even drives a psychiatrst ,called in to examine him, to the brink of madness. The Wilt character may belong to the middle classes of the times but he comes across as a true working class hero in his dealings with the pomposity of the establishment.

How could I pick fault with this book when it is just so entertaining? Of course modern readers may find it a little misogynistic and while some of the attitudes expressed in these pages may belong firmly to the era in which the book was written, to condemn it for these reasons would be a mistake. Eve Wilt is painted as a truly formidable character. So much so that the reader can empathise with her husband's murderous intentions towards her, and at no point does she feel like an helpless victim. Quite the contrary it is her husband, Henry who comes across as the victim. He is just a passive personality who bumbles his way through the book, while events befall him that will result in him regaining - no not regaining but  discovering his manhood for the first time, and coming out very much on top.

At the end of the book both Henry and Eve Wilt have undergone a transformation and this reader was left with split sides and an urge for more Henry Wilt.

Hugely entertaining...