Dead Man's Grip (Roy Grace Series #7)

by Peter James

Overview

American mobsters face off against England's greatest detective, Roy Grace, in Peter James' #1 international bestseller Dead Man's Grip

Carly Chase is still traumatized ten days after being in a fatal traffic accident that kills a teenage American student from Brighton University. Then she receives news that turns her entire world into a living nightmare. The drivers of the other two vehicles involved have been found tortured and murdered. Now Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Sussex Police force issues a stark and urgent warning to Carly: She could be next.                          

The student had deadly connections. Connections that stretch across the Atlantic to America and an organized crime group. Someone has sworn revenge and won’t rest until the final person involved in that fateful accident is dead. The police advise Carly her only option is to go into hiding and change her identity. The terrified woman disagrees. She knows these people have ways of hunting you down anywhere. If the police are unable to stop them, she has to find a way to do it herself. But already the killer is one step ahead of her, watching, waiting, and ready.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312643218
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	09/18/2012
Series:	Roy Grace Series , #7
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

PETER JAMES is the #1 international bestselling author of the Roy Grace series. His novels, including the number one bestseller Possession, have been translated into thirty languages and three have been filmed. All of his novels reflect his deep interest in the world of the police, with whom he does in-depth research, as well as science, medicine and the paranormal. He has produced numerous films, including The Merchant Of Venice, starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes. He divides his time between his homes in Notting Hill in London and near Brighton in Sussex.

Read an Excerpt

Dead Man's Grip

1

On the morning of the accident, Carly had forgotten to set the alarm and overslept. She woke with a bad hangover, a damp dog crushing her and the demented pounding of drums and cymbals coming from her son's bedroom. To add to her gloom, it was pelting with rain outside.

She lay still for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She had a chiropody appointment for a painful corn and a client she loathed would be in her office in just over two hours. It was going to be one of those days, she had the feeling, when things just kept on getting worse. Like the drumming.

'Tyler!' she yelled. 'For Christ's sake, stop that. Are you ready?'

Otis leapt off the bed and began barking furiously at his reflection in the mirror on the wall.

The drumming fell silent.

She staggered to the bathroom, found the paracetamols and gulped two down. I am so not a good example to my son, she thought. I'm not even a good example to my dog.

As if on cue, Otis padded into the bathroom, holding his lead in his mouth expectantly.

'What's for breakfast, Mum?' Tyler called out.

She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Mercifully, most of her forty-one-year-old - and this morning going on 241-year-old - face was shrouded in a tangle of blonde hair that looked, at this moment, like matted straw.

'Arsenic!' she shouted back, her throat raw from too many cigarettes last night. 'Laced with cyanide and rat poison.'

Otis stamped his paw on the bathroom tiles.

'Sorry, no walkies. Not this morning. Later. OK?'

'I had that yesterday!' Tyler shouted back.

'Well, it didn't sodding work, did it?'

She switched on the shower, waited for it to warm up, then stepped inside.

DEAD MAN'S GRIP. Copyright © 2011 by Really Scary Books/Peter James. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Editorial Reviews

British author James’s seventh crime novel featuring Det. Supt. Roy Grace (after 2010’s Dead Like You) opens with a fatal road accident in the center of Brighton involving a truck, a car, a van, and an unfortunate American cyclist, Tony Revere, who’s the grandson of Mafia boss Sal Giordano. While the initial focus is on the van driver, lowlife Ewan Preece, who raced away from the accident, it becomes apparent that there’s a more ominous force at work. Revere’s family hires a chillingly rational killer called Tooth to eliminate every person present at the accident—even though no one actually directly caused Revere’s death. Grace works the case withsidekick Det. Sgt. Glenn Branson and the rest of his team of well-sketched members, each bringing his or her individual talent to the investigation. The grim creativity of the victims’ deaths and the ease of movement of the action are two of the many compelling reasons to stick with this series. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Dead Like You

“Possibly the most engrossing thriller since The Silence of the Lambs.” —Washington Post Book World

“Sinister and riveting . . . Peter James is one of the best British crime writers, and therefore one of the best in the world.” —Lee Child

“A terrific thriller . . . Dead Like You is a haunting page-turner that seamlessly blends psychological suspense with police procedure, echoing the heart and voices of such authors as P. D. James and Ian Rankin at their best.” —Jeffery Deaver

“Peter James creates worlds as familiar as your backyard, but doubly spicy, smart, and entertaining. Danger and drama leap from every page, as the master delivers precisely what every reader wants:  plenty of sizzle and emotional clout. Dead Like You makes for a terrific read. Don’t miss this one.” —Steve Berry

“U.S. readers deserve to know what the rest of the world has known for years—Peter James is one of the best crime writers in the business.” —Karin Slaughter

“Thrilling . . . will leave readers eager for the next installment.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Rule of thumb: don't mess with a mobster's kid. One frantic morning, three stressed-out drivers are involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident. The dead bicyclist, an American graduate student studying in Brighton, is the son of an American Mafia family. Not content to let Det. Roy Grace and his colleagues find the sole driver who fled the accident scene, the boy's vengeful parents hire the very best hit man to kill all three drivers in a "creative" manner. He is quite thorough and cruel, and Grace needs to stop this guy before more innocent folks die. VERDICT This seventh entry in James's Roy Grace series (after Dead Like You) can be read as a stand-alone. Dollars to doughnuts your readers will come back begging for more after this exciting one. For fans of Lee Child and Jeffery Deaver—and perhaps Nelson DeMille.

Library Journal

A nasty accident on a rain-soaked Brighton street is equally fatal for its victims and its survivors. Whether he's distracted by recent sex or the weather or the early hour, American student Tony Revere rides his bicycle into an intersection on the wrong side of the street and is promptly mowed down by a lorry whose unknown driver speeds off. Two other drivers have been involved in the accident: long-haul trucker Stuart Ferguson and widowed solicitor Carly Chase. Ferguson is seriously injured; Carly is detained by the police after her night-before drinking causes her to fail a Breathalyzer test. Arrested and left in a cell, she despairs of her ruined day, the impending loss of her driving license and her uncertainty about how to get her son Tyler, 12, to school and back. Nor is it cause for joy when the Brighton CID, under veteran Det. Supt. Roy Grace (Dead Like You, 2010, etc.), clears her of causing the accident and releases her, for by then a much more serious threat has surfaced. Tony's controlling mother Fernanda, whose jailed father is "the New York Godfather" and whose husband Lou is the Mob's chief banker, flies in from Long Island to wail, gnash her teeth and offer a $100,000 reward for the identification (not, be it noted, the capture and conviction) of her son's killer. Meanwhile, convinced that all three drivers are at fault, Fernanda privately offers a killer named Tooth $1 million to eliminate them all, preferably in baroque and painful ways. It's almost too easy for Tooth to dispose of the first two unfortunates, but as he closes in on Carly, she hatches a desperate scheme to save herself. It doesn't exactly go as expected, and she's left much worse off than before with still many pages to go. As usual, James spins a kitchen-sink thriller that goes on forever, and very enjoyably, though it certainly could have been cut down to a single night's reading.

Kirkus Reviews