Love You Dead
Peter James
There is a Black Widow on the loose – having first turned to plastic surgery to make her beautiful, all that remains for Jodie Danforth to make herself rich by marrying a rich man. She isn’t all that excited about remaining married though – and she kills them off almost as fast as she gets married.
There is no need to have read the 11 books in the Roy Grace series before this. Other reviewers have complained that it took ages for the Detective to enter the story – I didn’t miss this because I didn’t know what to expect of him. I actually loved being in the mind of the ‘Black Widow’ and the other criminals.
I liked the criminals. I perhaps liked them more than the Detective himself! I was excited to get inside their thoughts and experience things. I actually sympathised with the petty house thief the most and wished he could have gotten straight before, well, dying.
If you have a thing for reptiles and interesting poisons, the thing you’re going to love about this novel is the reptile room. I would have loved to learn more about the poisons, but there are still limits on facts you can include in a novel, even one this large.
I really enjoyed reading this novel, and would have given it 5 stars, had it not been that I was reading a Iris & Roy Johansen crime novel with my favourite heroine Kendra at the same time. All in all, this was ‘just’ another crime novel, albeit a very well written and researched one. I’m certainly not going to turn down other novels by Peter James!
Pan Macmillan | 26 July 2016 | AU $29.99 | Paperback
Review Update: 7 December 2021 – Why yes, I did enjoy this a second time around! It still skips between perspectives a bit too much for my liking, but I felt like I could see the net closing in! And again, I’m still fascinated by the poisons, and wish I had learnt more about them.
Lily is very… cold. I found it difficult to empathise with her because she seemed unchanged by deaths she had caused. Is it simply a side effect of being a witch? Or is it something else about her character that makes her too much like Lillian. They are the same person after all. I don’t think it was all about Lillian manipulating Lily, much as Rowan wanted to blame her.
There is no feeling of Merlin as a character as she begins simply as a construction of impersonal memories. The novel is plot based, and moves at a relatively fast pace once Merlin encounters other inhabitants of the desolate world. As long as you read this lightly without too many preconceived notions of how an apocalyptic novel should go, you will enjoy it.
I gobbled this up in an hour. I couldn’t put it down. The way Black interacted with her family, with Ed and with the others spoke strongly of her ability to keep on going. But Black, I’m sorry. Sometimes you just aren’t that bright. Sure, you are under a lot of stress, but seriously! Then again, you are only a teenager and teenagers tend to do things like that.
Nessa is an interesting character with her own mind, and she truly grows throughout the novel. It’s not just plot driven, there is definitely character development. Not to mention some very nice world-building of the island and its inhabitants.
To an extent I felt like I didn’t know Lily, despite having things from her perspective the whole time. She is a crucible I suppose, so being empty is part of it. I did feel like her character progressed though. Rowan on the other hand felt very static, although his attitude to Lily changed. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
The first half of the novel kept me enthralled, but this petered out in the second half. I was fascinated by the gymnastics, not by the politics. In the end, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take away from the novel. Translated from French, I think this novel may have lost some of its charm.
I liked the realistic imagining of the different time periods. Phew, parallel worlds went completely nutty! There are so many ways for people to die, and then be refound. Maggie in particular gets to ‘enjoy’ this particular feeling, which is pretty crazy!
This novel’s perspective can be a little off-putting before you get used to it. It’s written as ‘we’, which progressively gets to be a smaller ‘we’ as the book goes on and more of them lose their powers.
Nooo! Past me, why did you not write notes on what you enjoyed about this novel? I could have sworn I had some notes sitting in my draft folder. Ah well. I can tell you that this was an excellent example of teenage fiction, and I really enjoyed it.