Then there is the sadistic Vic, who knows more than he should about Michael’s offshore accounts eventually all these threads are drawn neatly together.īrighton - described with a sharp appreciation for its mixture of stylishness and squalor - has been a good backdrop for murder and mayhem since Graham Greene’s day. Equally unhelpful is the beautiful Ashley, Michael’s fiancée, who seems more interested in maintaining her perfectly groomed appearance than in finding her future husband. The arrival of Michael’s business partner, Mark Warren - who was to have been best man at the wedding - seems likely to be able to provide the clue to Michael ’s whereabouts but he claims to know nothing about the disastrous prank. Michael is left to ponder his fate for a nail-biting number of chapters while Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, of the Brighton police, has to unravel a satisfyingly complex puzzle in his quest to find him. Leaving aside the question of what kind of friends would come up with such a scheme, what follows is gripping. (Feb.Peter James’s superior thriller opens with a stag-night prank gone wrong: buried alive in a stolen coffin, the prospective groom, a property developer named Michael Harrison, is left with no food or water and diminishing air when the pranksters are wiped out in a freak accident. The "buried alive" trope is undeniably powerful, and Grace shows promise as a hero-but the crime and the plot surrounding Michael's plight are just too cumbersome and transparent to really engage the reader. Grace, a detective with a taste for the supernatural (he uses mediums to help him solve crimes), gets on the case and discovers just how devious Michael's friends have been. His cell phone doesn't work, but he does have a two-way radio whose companion is in the hands of Davey, a mentally challenged young man who finds the phone near the scene of the accident. But when their van crashes head-on into a truck and three of them are killed (the fourth dies later "in hospital"), Michael is trapped. As a prank, four of his friends bury Michael alive in a coffin equipped with a breathing tube and a bottle of whiskey and leave him, ostensibly for a couple of hours. Michael Harrison, a successful real estate developer with a penchant for practical jokes, gets a horrible taste of his own medicine. British author James's far-fetched but terrifying thriller is the first of a new series featuring Det.
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