The latest outing for mega-selling Peter James's Brighton detective Roy Grace - You Are Dead (Macmillan, £20) - finds him faced with the nightmare all homicide police dread: a serial killer. When a young woman is abducted from an underground car park in the middle of Brighton, it is soon established that her disappearance is linked to the abductions and murders of a string of young women - all in their 20s and all with long, brown hair - over the course of two decades.
It is clear early on who the main suspect is, so what grips here is not so much whodunnit as the thrill of the police chase. James is very good on police work. He has strong links with the constabulary in Brighton (a couple of police cars are named after him, apparently). His respect for the force and his understanding of how it operates are obvious.
In one particularly revealing chapter written from the point of view of the volunteer dispatch officer who takes a call from the woman's desperate fiancé, the behind-the-scenes detail smacks of real authenticity. Who knew there were so many different police ranks?
James has devoted lot of research to the psychology of such serial-killing monsters as Ted Bundy, Harold Shipman and Dennis Rader -- the self-styled BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill. The killer here, too, is convincingly creepy, and the fate of his victims gruesome.
Grace is a kind of antidote to the clichéd maverick cop with a troubled private life and a problem with authority. He is liked and respected by his colleagues, contentedly married to wife number two, Cleo, with a new baby. True, one shadow hangs over his life - wife number one, Sandy, disappeared seven years ago with not a trace of her since. Until now.
Grace also crops up in Twist of the Knife (Pan £7.99), a collection of James's short stories now in paperback. It includes his first case, a burglary with an unexpected conclusion - a "twist", in common with most of the tales. Intriguingly, the collection includes an autobiographical story, My First Ghost, in which James reveals his interest in the paranormal and how that interest started.
A surprising amount of this spookiness derives from wives doing away with husbands or vice versa. There's also a couple of decapitations and a man's corpse pecked clean by seagulls as his wife watches. Very Jamesian.
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