New York City – DaneCobain.com

TitleDead Man’s Time

Author: Peter James

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 504

Rating 3.75/5

Dead Man’s Time is another installment in James’ Roy Grace series in which we follow the Brighton-based detective as he investigates a crime spanning 90 years. It all goes back to a murder that took place in New York City in 1922, and I quite liked the way that the two different time periods came back together, especially towards the end. It was kind of anticlimactic in a way, but it was also the only real ending that could have happened.

It’s also interesting how the bad guys in this book aren’t actually all that bad, although they do their fair share of bad things. If anything, the main bad guy in this is the one who had it in for Roy Grace and who was out to get him and his family, a story line that took place in tandem with the main story but which wasn’t necessarily a part of it.

The main story, though, basically follows what appears to be a burglary gone wrong in which an old woman is tortured until she’s on the brink of death. They also take all of her art, her antiques and her valuables, leaving Roy Grace stuck trying to track it down in a race across time across Brighton and, later on, elsewhere in the world.

I don’t think that this is Peter James’ best book, but then I’ve read quite a few of them by now and you’re always going to find some books that are better than others in any series. It’s still worth reading though, and while you don’t need to read them all in order if you don’t want to, you will get a little bit more from the story if you do. Not from the crime at the centre of it perhaps, but certainly from the back story. When I read it, there were characters there that I knew would be dead or in jail a few books down the line.

What I will say is that even though I’ve read over a dozen of James’ books (including two 500+ page books in the last couple of weeks), I’m still enjoying them, and I’m probably going to pick up another 600-pager next weekend as I’ll be spending a lot of time travelling. James’ writing is sleek and easy to absorb, and at the same time it’s not intimidating. I don’t read his books and wonder how anyone could have ever written them. I just read them and enjoy them and then look forward to the next one.

So would I recommend this? Of course I would, but I would suggest reading through them in order if you can just so that you don’t spoil yourself for some of the storylines that come in alongside the mysteries. And it was cool that James included references to charities and other organisations that support some of the issues raised.

Click here to buy Dead Man’s Time.

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.”