Dead Tomorrow
Dead Tomorrow by Peter James Macmillan, HK$120
Planning on cooking up a crime novel? You'll need the right ingredients.
First, a setting. This should be a city: some mean streets are essential. But avoid over-crowded places: you can't throw a brick in London, New York or Los Angeles without hitting a sleuth or criminal mastermind. Somewhere like Oxford or Edinburgh will look attractive in your TV series. Peter James' Brighton was a good choice, with its seedy glamour, picture-postcard pier and the sea, from which corpse after corpse is dredged in this latest novel.
You will need an investigator, usually a bit battered, with a problematic personal life. Interestingly lonely, he should be inexplicably attractive to gorgeous women. If you have time, marinade him for several years in police procedure. He can be hard-boiled and laconic, but nouvelle cuisine crime-writing favours a soft centre of empathy and a love of animals.
James' Superintendent Roy Grace has a girlfriend who works in the morgue and has a dog called Humphrey. The girlfriend has just told him she's pregnant, and Grace is over the moon. As detectives go, he's a New Man.
A signature habit or eccentricity is a must. It can be almost anything, from classical music or writing poetry to a taste for poker or cocaine. Probably not knitting.
A tragic past is also useful for when the plot flags: you can trail its mystery through several books. Perhaps your hero's wife has disappeared, like Grace's Sandy (we know where she is, but he doesn't), or his sister has been abducted by aliens, or his father or mother was a murderer. Grace hangs out with psychics, a garnish that gives his stories a supernatural flavour and at the same time is really handy for finding where the bodies are buried.
Of course, the essential ingredient is some crime. One murder is considered a bit half-baked these days: serial killers are everywhere. Some palates are so jaded they can't taste a story that doesn't have a thick sauce of mutilation or torture or other abuse. In Dead Tomorrow, all these ingredients are cannily sourced from the East European black market in human organs.
Got all that? Simmer them all together, add a fiendish plot twist at the last moment and serve with shy pride in a seasonal paperback. Leftovers can be heated up and re-used as often as you like.
This is the fifth in James' successful series featuring Grace and his fans will love it. Others may find it a bit humdrum in its details and slow to start moving. But it does build to an exciting climax and it deals with issues - human trafficking and the organ transplant business - that involve ordinary people in real tragedy.
James has kept the pot boiling and served up another treat. No Michelin star, but an enthusiastic recommendation.
