Book Review: Peter James, DEAD MAN'S TIME

Dead Man’s Time by Peter James is the ninth procedural featuring Brighton's Detective Superintendent Roy Grace,  who confronts a case spanning nations and generations (available October 15, 2013).

Dead Man’s Time starts in 1922 New York, when we see a little boy lose his parents to murder. This same little boy gets shipped off to Ireland to be cared for by his aunt, but not before a mysterious stranger arrives at the dock with a valuable watch that belonged to the boy’s dead father. That’s our tie in to the book’s title: Dead Man’s Time. Without going into to too much detail, I will say that the 1922 story line dovetails nicely with the crime happening in the story in the present day in a very interesting way.

Then, we fast forward to the present day, where we have a particularly nasty career criminal by the name of Amis Smallbone (love that name) preparing to make our hero, Detective Superintendent Grace pay dearly for doing his job and putting Smallbone in jail years ago. This character is richly rendered and jumps off the page. Here’s a little peek into Amis Smallbone’s revenge-getting thought process, one that also enables him to avoid taking any responsibility for his own life:

Of course, Grace hadn’t been a Detective Superintendent back then: just a jumped-up, newly promoted Inspector who had picked on him, targeted him, fitted him up, twisted the evidence, been oh so clever, so fucking smug. It was Grace’s persecution that had condemned him, now, to this cruddy rented flat, with its shoddy furniture, no-smoking signs on the walls in each room, and having to report and bloody kowtow to a Probation Officer regularly.

He put the paper down, stood up a little unsteadily, and carried his glass over to the dank-smelling kitchenette, popping some ice cubes out of the fridge-freezer into his glass. It was just gone midday, and he was thinking hard. Thinking how much pleasure he was going to get from hurting Roy Grace. It was the one thing that sustained him right now. The rest of the nation had Olympic fever—the games were starting in a month’s time. But he didn’t give a toss about them; getting even with Roy Grace was all he cared about.

[Will revenge clean Grace's clock...]