Lead Review

• Book: Dead Man’s Grip (Roy Grace 7)
• Location: Brighton
• Author: Peter James

James has slowly but surely worked his way towards an almost unassailable position as one of Britain’s best-loved crime writers. That sense of place, of course, is located in Brighton, the increasingly fashionable setting just an hour’s train journey from London, and over the course of his novels, James is proving to be as adroit chronicler of that town as Graham Greene in Brighton Rock (although James has yet to write a novel quite as intense as Green’s masterpiece — a fact that he would no doubt admit, as Greene’s novel is a particular favourite of Peter James). And the character that James locates here is his tenacious copper Roy Grace (shortly to be incarnated in a long-overdue television series). Dead Man’s Grip is a particularly gripping entry in the Grace series, although to say that it is not massively different from other books in the sequence is simply to note that James has shown a remarkable consistency over all the Roy Grace books.

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