Peter James is taking over the world - or at least the crime fiction
part of it. Dead Like You, the latest instalment in his increasingly
popular series featuring Brighton detective Roy Grace, has sold even
more spectacularly than its predecessors, keeping crime heavyweights
James Patterson and John Grisham from the number one slot in the
UK bestseller lists. And after lengthy delays, the long-awaited
television series is to be made - a series that will no doubt make
Grace's stamping ground of Brighton as familiar as Inspector Morse's
Oxford. So what is the secret of the James/Grace success? It's simple:
over many years and many books, James has refined his storytelling
skills to the nth degree and has the full measure of the classic
police procedural narrative. In the new book, Brighton's Metropole
Hotel is the scene of an unpleasant incident: a woman is savagely
raped when she enters a room. Some days later, another woman is
similarly assaulted -- both have their shoes stolen by the offender.
Assigned to the case, Detective Superintendent Grace becomes aware
that these two incidents have disturbing echoes of a sequence of
crimes that shook Brighton in 1997. The rapist (who had been
described as .Shoe Man.) claimed five victims, the last of which he
had murdered before disappearing. Grace is faced with two unpleasant
possibilities; that the original Shoe Man who cheated justice 10
years ago has returned to wreak havoc again, or - equally disturbingly -
there is a copycat at work.

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