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|title=Dead Simple

|author=Peter James

|genre=Crime

|summary=The first in a new detective series featuring Detective Superintendent Roy Grace will pass a few idle hours but probably not excite. If reading about someone trapped in a coffin gives you a panic attack then you might want to avoid the book.

|buy=No

|borrow=Maybe

|pages=400

|publisher=Pan

|date=January 2006

|isbn=0330434195

}}

Five young men go out on a stag night. The groom-to-be has always been a practical joker and his friends are determined to pay him back. All are the worse for drink when they bury the groom alive in a coffin and leave him, intending to return in an hour or two, but within minutes three of the young men are dead in a traffic accident and the fourth dies in hospital without regaining consciousness. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace investigates the disappearance of the groom and he's convinced that the bride-to-be and the groom's business partner know a lot more than they're telling.

It's not a bad book, you know, but neither is it a particularly good book. It doesn't even have the merit of being so bad it's good. It's quite simply a rather mediocre book which might fill in a few hours if you're stuck for something to read. It has all the hallmarks of someone jumping on the bandwagon of those people who've written a successful series of books featuring one particular detective - Colin Dexter's Morse, Ruth Rendell's Wexford, Ian Rankin's Rebus and Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen spring to mind - but this book's not a patch on any of them. Read it if you like, but don't say I didn't warn you.

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