Car Crash – DaneCobain.com

Title: Dead Simple

Author: Peter James

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 470

Rating 4/5

This is the first Peter James book, and I was actually quite impressed by how good it was. As a general rule, I’ve found that he got better and better as time went on, so I was surprised to find that his first was pretty good. The main problems that I spotted were a couple of typos, but they didn’t really hamper my enjoyment.

It was also interesting because it was set back in 2005, which would have been when it was written. Mobile phones had physical keypads on them and the smoking ban was yet to take effect. Then there’s the fact that we’re introduced to a bunch of characters that appear throughout the rest of the series, and so it was good to get to know them from that initial meeting.

The good news is that you don’t need to read them in order if you don’t want to, and I’ve just been picking them up every time I see them in charity shops. It’s not a bad way of doing it, but it’s also not the best, because you’ll spoil yourself for bits of the characters’ personal lives.

The plot in this one revolves around what at first glance appears to be a stag night prank gone wrong. The groom has been buried alive in a coffin and the stag party, the only ones who know where he is, have been killed in a car crash. Enter Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Brighton police force, as he tries to figure out what’s going on in a race against time.

There were plenty of twists and turns to keep you going throughout this novel, and I was also taken by surprise by the big reveal at the end. James does a great job of setting your expectations and then subverting them, and I think it’s that which makes him a decent crime writer. That’s especially difficult to pull off when, as in this novel, the reader gets to see from the point of view of the suspects, as well as the police force.

All in all, this was a pretty solid book and a decent start to the Roy Grace series, although I also think that it gets better over time. Seeing as it’s the first book in the series, I don’t know why you wouldn’t start here, but if you are tempted to skip in then that’s fine too. Just make sure that you come back to it eventually, because it really is worth reading. It’s a decent example of what a crime novel should be and I know it’s easy to say looking back, but it seems obvious he was destined for great things.

Click here to buy Dead Simple.

Neil Gaiman – American Gods | Review

Title: American Gods

Author: Neil Gaiman

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 643

Rating: 9/10

Neil Gaiman – American Gods

Well, I finally got round to reading it. So many different people with such seemingly incompatible tastes have recommended American Gods to me over the years that when I saw it for 99p in a charity shop, I knew what I had to do. I even put it off for a while after I bought it, but I wish I hadn’t – sure, the book looks pretty dense with its hundreds of pages, but the print is easy on the eyes and the story is gripping and entertaining right from the word go.

Loosely speaking, the story answers a question – what if the gods of old were still manifest and wandering around America? And what about the new gods, of media and the internet? Gaiman takes these thoughts to their logical conclusion and delivers an epic ballad of the 21st century, in which gods and goddesses are juxtaposed with New York City cab drivers and Vegas casinos.

The main character is an ex-con called Shadow, who leaves prison at the start of the story only to find that his wife has died in a car crash. He’s approached by a mysterious ‘man’ called Wednesday, who offers him a job on the spot, a job which Shadow reluctantly accepts.

Neil Gaiman

I can’t say too much more, because I don’t want to ruin the story-line, but I think I can tell you that as it develops, you learn more and more about the gods and their current aims in early 00s America. Gaiman also dips in to the past from time to time, and every now and then at the end of a chapter you’ll be transported to America in the 1600s, or in the years long ago before the Roman Empire, in the days of the native Americans.

And it all adds to the story – it’s the kind of novel in which everything feels beautifully interrelated, as if every little thing happens for a reason and you ignore them at your peril. In fact, it has the same level of interconnection as a great crime novel – this is what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have written had he lived in the 21st century. This is not a detective novel, but in many ways the secrets that the gods harbour could be classed as the ultimate mystery, and one that Shadow unravels throughout the book.

My copy of the book is marked ‘Author’s preferred text‘, and while I have nothing to base a comparison on, it seems crazy to me that anyone might want to read anything else. However, something weird happened at the end of my copy, and I have no idea why…

Neil Gaiman Quote

It’s hard to explain without showing you, but basically the book began again – in the middle of a sentence, as page 611 drew to a close, the narrative stopped. The following page was the author’s biography, and if you continued to read then it was exactly the same as the start of the book including the introduction and author’s note on the text, coming to a close at the end of the first chapter.

It’s hard to figure out whether this was a printing mistake or something that was deliberately included at the author’s request – after all, it does turn the narrative in to a sort of cycle, and perhaps it was supposed to be a point about the way that history repeats itself. It’s strange, because the sentence made perfect sense – here, the blue text shows you what was being said in the story, and the green text is Gaiman’s author bio: “And then they’ll go down and look and see Neil Gaiman is a messy-haired white male author trapped in the body of an identical white male author with perhaps even less-tidy hair.”