Audio book review: Love You Dead by Peter James - Rich men beware!

Love You Dead is about Jodie Bentley, a childhood ugly ducking who reinvents herself as a beautiful woman looking for love.  Her plan is to marry a rich man so she can realise her dream of affluence and status.  Once she's got the money, well...the man dosn't really matter - it's then simply about finding a way to to get rid of him and keeping the money of course.  "Getting rid" of course, means murder! Jodie has a few false starts but she's a woman at the top of her game, effortlessly using her beauty and charm plus a dogged determination, that can only be desribed as professional, to find, seduce and entrap a wealthy man into her scheme of love, marriage and an extremely short life expectancy.

This isn't the only part of the story - there's the matter of Grace's previously unresolved case, Sandy - that ever present ghost from the past - a plotline that never seems to be quite tied up, and finally his vile and manipulative senior officer Cassian Pugh who is looking for any opportunity to stab grace in the back.  Well, If all these parts of the plot aren't enough, Jodie also herself finds her life is about to get complicated too - she's not as quite as clever as she thinks she is, because she's got a hitman on her tail - an equally determined professional, tasked with ending Jodie's life in a painful and most unpleasant way.

So, my thoughts - I won't hide the fact that I think Peter James is a great author and despite his prolific output is nowhere near running out of steam, as many authors who write a series based around a single key character do.  The core idea of the novel, the black widow, is really simple, which for me is a huge plus becasue it's an idea  think most readers can easily relate to.  But even though the basic idea is simple, it's far from a one dimensional novel, as the Jodie Bentley story has several strands to it, as well as the other sub plots of catching the escaped killer from Grace's previous case, and of course Sandy - will that ever be resolved?  Thank goodness you can always rely on Marlon the goldfish - still swimming round and round in his bowl after all the previous novels.

One thing that surprised me, was that Grace hardly makes an appearance for what I thought was probably the first half of the book.  However, even though we don't see Grace much for a long while, it says a lot to me about the quality of James' writing that he's confident enough to spend a big chunk of the book concentrating on Jodie Bentley and her backstory, leaving Grace to only really appear in a major role until well into the nodel.  For me that was a real plus.

I listened to Love You Dead as an Audible audiobook and as always was impressed by the quality of the narration - Daniel Weyman has narrated several of James' novels, with charectarisation and delivery which is simply excellent.

Final verdict - 100% recommendation

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