Wish You Were Dead by Peter James
Genre: Crime – Thriller – Police Procedural
📖 This is a great holiday read for those wanting a crime twist to their holiday reading. Roy Grace is a detective superintendent who packs up his family for a luxury holiday at a small boutique type hotel in France. Arriving late, things go wrong very quickly, with an unhelpful host, and a member of their party not yet arrived, the holiday is stalled before it has even begun. Yet, things take a more sinister turn which leaves Roy fighting to protect his family from an old adversary he had hoped never to meet again.
✍️ As other reviewers have pointed out, this story does not involve the traditional police procedural detective novels some might expect if they are familiar with the Roy Grace novels. It instead focuses on his family and his need to protect them. I have never previously read the Roy Grace series but didn’t feel this detracted from the story.
🗣 I often think it’s useful to see an extract of a book to get an idea of the writing style. Here is a brief extract so that you can see a sample of the writing yourself:
As Cleo dialled yet again, Bruno announced, reading from his iPad, ‘Papa, Mama, Listen!’
‘Yes, Bruno?’ Cleo said.
‘It says that next to being in a car, this is where you are most likely to die. Guess where?’
‘In an aeroplane?’ said Cleo, who did not like flying.
‘Wrong!’
‘Your kitchen,’ Roy Grace said.
‘Wrong, this is the third most likely place! It says here the next most likely place to dis is on holiday. We’re in a car and we are on holiday. Doesn’t that make it probable we are all going to die?’
Roy frowned. Bruno often came up with weird stuff. ‘So it’s lucky we’re not in a camper van, then, Bruno?’
‘Why?’
‘Because they have kitchens. So we would be in a car, on holiday and in a kitchen!’
They all laughed.¨C22C
👓 The story itself was fast-paced (which is how I like my crime novels) with the whole thing taking place in around 24 hours. I hadn’t read any of the previous Roy Grace novels but felt it gave more than enough backstory to those books to figure out who was whom and why they were important.
💔 Any Negatives: I enjoyed this story. I wouldn’t say it was as good as some of the other quick reads mostly because it is clearly an extension to or even an excerpt of a much larger series. Therefore, it is probably not the best place to start within a series. As a member of the quick-reads collection, it is often the aim to encourage the users to pick up a book and read which they wouldn’t normally. Something with so much backstory is probably not the best place to start. If a new reader now wanted to continue the series they need to decide whether to go back to the beginning of the Roy Grace series or try to pick up where this book sits and continue from there. I think that could be off-putting.
💭 Overall View: I enjoyed this book and it was great to see a lighter crime novel in amongst the quick-reads series. I enjoyed the story, the characters and the setting. I would certainly look out for other works by this author.
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