Title: I Follow You

Author: Peter James

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 440

Rating: 4/5

This book was fun because it was some standalone Peter James, and so it was nice to have it to compare to the Roy Grace series. It has a similar feel because it’s much the same genre, although instead of being a police procedural novel, it’s more of a thriller. That’s good, because that’s exactly what I was in the mood for.

It’s set on the British island of Jersey, which is somewhere that I’ve not really explored through fiction before, and I liked the way that it gave it a sort of small town feel because Jersey is a small island. It seems like everyone knows each other, but that’s kind of required because it follows a kind of “respectable stalker” who needed to have a plausible reason for repeatedly bumping into their target.

Then there’s the medical malpractice angle and the fascinating scene in which there’s a crash between two light aircraft on the runway, with all of the chaos that’s implied by that. It wasn’t necessarily easy to read, but it was certainly well written and played a vital part in the story.

The characters here felt well fleshed out, which is impressive given that this is a standalone novel and so James didn’t have the same amount of time to work on it as he did with his Roy Grace books. Honestly, this is the kind of book that he used to write early on his career, except now he’s much better at the execution.

There’s not much more I can tell you about this one without going into spoilers, and I don’t want to do that because this is the kind of book where most of the fun comes from wondering whether the good people will make it through to the final page and whether the bad ones will get their comeuppance.

But what I will say is that the combination of solid writing, good characterisation and decent pacing means that this is the kind of book that you just want to keep reading. It’s difficult to put it down, and James makes it easy to binge on because he’s a master of writing short chapters that aren’t a word longer than they need to be.

In fact, if you’ve been thinking about giving James a go and you haven’t known where to start, it’s not a bad call to go with this one. If you like it, you can move on to his Roy Grace series, but there’s a ton of those.

Learn more about I Follow You.