Love You Dead

Starred review from August 22, 2016
James’s immensely satisfying 12th Roy Grace procedural (after 2015’s You Are Dead) finds the Brighton detective superintendent taking a month off to recuperate after being shot in the leg by Dr. Edward Crisp, a suspected serial killer he was trying to arrest. In addition, Grace faces a horrid boss and demoralizing budget cuts to the police force. Fortunately, a convoluted case soon returns Grace to his favorite occupation—solving murders. Psychopathic gold digger Jodie Bentley has been luring one elderly suitor after another into her lethal web. The doggedly determined Grace leads his team in the dual effort to apprehend black widow Jodie and also Crisp, who has so far eluded justice. On the personal side, Grace is the happy husband of pathologist Cleo and the besotted father of an infant son. But then his first wife, who’d been declared dead, turns up, leaving him with a 10-year-old son he never suspected he had. James juggles his multiple story lines with panache as the action hurtles to a shattering conclusion. Agent: Carole Blake, Blake Friedmann Literary (U.K.).

July 15, 2016
Surrey DCI Roy Grace (Billionaire, 2015, etc.) goes up against a silky black widow--and a pair of unwelcome blasts from his own past.Jodie Bentley was never as attractive as her older sister, Cassie, and her parents drilled it into her head early on that beauty was the key to a have-it-all lifestyle. Years after doing some serious work on both her body and her family, she's snared elderly American financier Walt Klein, whom she entices onto the slopes of an Alpine ski resort and to his death. Mission accomplished, except that Walt turns out to be a lot less wealthy than Jodie thought--he was even facing prosecution for a Ponzi scheme--and she has to pin her dreams to someone else, someone like high-profile London art dealer Rowley Carmichael. Rollo really is wealthy, and it's not likely he'll last long at all. In between her two beaus, Jodie's hooked up in New York with mob bagman Romeo Munteanu, a brief encounter that seriously enriches her but puts Tooth, a professional killer, on her trail. As Tooth and his unwitting prey ponder their homicidal plots, Grace gets some disconcerting news about two people he thought were dead: Sandy, the wife who abandoned him when he took up with Cleo, the medical tech he impregnated and married, and Dr. Edward Crisp, the general practitioner who killed five people and sent Grace to the hospital before he vanished. Sandy's been struck by a taxi in Munich; Crisp has been arrested in France. A witless burglar who breaks into Jodie's Brighton home and pays a high price for his foolishness improbably sets Grace on the scent of both Jodie and Tooth. But there's no evidence to speak of against her, and he's as insubstantial as a murderous will-o'-the-wisp. Except in the Crisp subplot, which remains very sub indeed, James dots every I and crosses every T.The results are absorbing, unspectacular, predictable, and satisfying.

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August 1, 2016
Dead figures in the title of every one of the crime thrillers in this best-selling series. In the latest, the twelfth, the title refers to the active villain here, a woman who goes after wealthy and lonely older men, completely captivates them, and then murders them. Part of the chilling fun here is that much of the mystery is from the killer's point of view. Readers are first introduced to Jodie Bentley at a posh ski resort in the French Alps as she and her fiance head for the slopes and to the fiance's seeming accident. Series hero Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Brighton Constabulary is still tracking an elusive physician/serial killer when the Lyon Gendarmerie asks for his helpthe Black Widow is a UK citizen. A series of reversals leads the widow into more crimes, especially nerve-shredding since she is an avid reptile-keeper. James is a master of constructing the kind of plot that twists and turns, ensnaring the reader in its grasp.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)