Dead Tomorrow

This is a thrilling book, and although long for a mystery, the pages fly by. James offers superb characterization, even minor characters are adequately described, his dialogue is convincing and his grasp of a German speaking English is enjoyably correct. The story has good pace and his descriptions of the Brighton Hove region bring back fond memories. The author's grasp of the nuances of the international organ trafficking is highly instructive and frightening.

The sixth book in the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series finds him, several months after the events which took place in the prior novel, "Dead Man's Footsteps," promoted to head up the Major Crime squad. His nemesis, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, has been promoted and moved to another part of the country, making his job a bit easier and less stressful. He is presently trying to impress her successor, but finds that effort quite difficult by virtue of the new case he and his squad are working on: Three dead bodies have been found in the English Channel, all their major internal organs quite expertly excised. The ensuing investigation, run along various lines, brings into play a timely issue: the international trafficking of not only humans, but human organs. The author puts a very human face on the tale, introducing Caitlin Beckett, a teenager living for the past six years with serious liver disease, becoming more serious by the day, with her mother desperately willing to do anything necessary to save her life. On a more personal note, Grace, approaching forty years of age, is finally able to move on, romantically, after his wife's complete and utter disappearance nearly ten years prior, and is hoping to make his relationship with Cleo, the area's chief mortician, more permanent. The cops in this novel, as usual with this author, are truly dedicated, altruistic men and women. Still present, among other cops we have grown to know and love, is Glenn Branson, whose unhappy marital situation has him still in residence in Grace's living quarters. Parenthetically, I greatly enjoyed seeing Jeffery Deaver make a brief appearance as a drug dealer, albeit a dead one, as well as an homage to Val McDermid as the author of a novel [one which I myself had greatly enjoyed] being read by one of the book's characters. Among my other favorite things about the book was the author invoking two oracles I have loved in detective fiction for years, to wit: one Mr. Conan Doyle, who famously said, "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," and the other Occam's Razor, of the true origins of which I was previously unaware - leave it to Mr. James to enlighten me about this as in so many other things! As Mr. James tells it: "Occam was a fourteenth-century philosopher monk who used the analogy of taking a razor-sharp knife and to cut away everything but the most obvious explanation. That, Brother Occam believed, was where the truth usually lay." Both are used to great effect in this case. The tale is a rather grim one, dealing with a macabre subject, obviously well researched by the author. A hefty book, my one criticism is that it might have benefited from some judicious editing. That said, the novel is recommended.

The suspense begins with a brief introduction to a motorcyclist who leaves his house and never returns. In contrast, the doctor's surgery and of a distraught mother being told the news of her daughter needing an urgent liver transplant takes us to another storyline of familiarity, a family doctor breaking the news to the mother, Lynn, that her daughter, Caitlin, needs a liver transplant donor to help her survive but the ongoing struggle to find a donor continues throughout the book, whilst her condition worsens. Another suspense, begun in the second chapter, to lead the plot on and an Oliver Twist type tale in the streetwise figure of Simona who pickpockets, begs and steal but neither she nor her accomplice, Romeo could `will' the pangs of hunger away from her `family' of 6, who squatted permanently in an underground cavity until their paths crossed those of the organ traffickers. A traffic accident involving a motorcyclist makes us think of the character in the opening chapter and the emergence of the driver involved in the crash scene, tries to convinve the traffic police officer that she had no idea he was there as he'd suddenly appear from nowhere. From the scene of a road accident and in stark contrast, we meet Superintendent Roy Grace with a hangover from one of many festive invites and we get a glimpse of the way his life is turning out after the disappearance of his wife, 9 years ago. A body is hauled up from the sea by officers onboard a dredger ship where Caitlin's father, Malcolm was on duty that night and a witness to this sighting; neither he nor the other staff on duty were considered prime suspects of this murder but names had to be accounted for. On further pathological tests, a number of suggestions as to the cause of this person's death range from, being an organ donor, a heart attack, a motorbike accident - which all seem unlikely - yet the thought of him being an organ donor lurks in the back of our minds until we are told the pathologist was convinced the organs were surgically removed. This sparks off a police search around the Shoreham Harbour port and found a couple more bodies dumped in the sea at roughly the same time, increasing the likely possibility of the crime being related to organ trafficking. A fourth body and the search for a Shoreham-registered fishing boat brings us back to Vlad Comescu and his blunder in killing the person who had disposed of the 3 bodies, too near to shore, in a dredge area where along with the sand and sediments pumped up by the material disposal pumps, the bodies were inevitably found. This is the new Roy Grace novel in this series of crime thrillers and as with his other novels, you'll not put the book down until the final page - the suspense continues until the end. The initial impression the reader gets is that the author has plotted out the themes in such a way that depicts a number of storylines which come together as a whole towards the final chapters and like his early