Chasing black widow

Love You Dead
Peter James
Pan Macmillan
2016, pp 599, Rs 350

The textbook definition of protagonist is the “main character” of a story —  the one without which this story would not exist. By that standard, even though Love You Dead is marketed as the 12th Roy Grace novel, the protagonist of this book is really Jodie Bentley.

Bentley is a woman who wants to become super-rich by marrying a billionaire and then killing him off. Unfortunately, the new husband she manages to knock off at a ski resort is deep in debt. She must begin her hunt again. At a bar, looking for a one-night stand, she manages to run afoul of a smuggler, and steals a USB stick and money from him. The smuggling gang sends an assassin — a man named Tooth — after her to recover the goods and teach her a lesson. The hunter is now the hunted (although she doesn’t know it yet). In the meantime, Jodie has shortlisted another millionaire and is slowly enmeshing him in her “affection”. The millionaire has plans to take Jodie on an around-the-world cruise, while Jodie is planning his murder in the most undetectable way possible.

Hang on, you say, we are nearly a hundred pages in, and where is Roy Grace? Aren’t the Roy Grace books police procedurals? Not this one, though. Love You Dead follows the two main characters — Jodie and Tooth — as they cross and recross paths. They’re accompanied by other supporting cast, like a bumbling housebreaker, various old men who fall prey to Jodie’s black widow schemes, and several gangsters and lowlifes. There are also episodes of flashbacks to establish Jodie’s background, and how she became a black widow.

Roy Grace makes an entry into the story only about halfway through, and for a while he isn’t even looking for Jodie. He’s trying to catch a villain who escaped in the previous instalment of the series, and he seems like an afterthought to the main story. The structure of the book is more akin to a thriller, with the main characters interacting with each other, and their paths crossing only incidentally. Imagine something like Strangers on a Train, or a Pulp-Fiction-like book. A good example from Bollywood would be the movie Dum Maaro Dum, which ends very differently from expectations. Your typical thriller keeps you on the edge of the seat by being unpredictable.

This kind of structure has its problems when force-fitted into a police procedural series. For one, the multiple-plotline thriller relies on blurring the good versus bad characters for its shock value. On top of that, the ‘good guy’ doesn’t necessarily win. The police procedural, on the other hand, has the mystery always solved by the active intervention of the detective, and the detective to win eventually. And of course, the detective doesn’t die unless the writer is extremely tired of him. The only leeway allowed to the overall positive plot is the personal life of the policeman,  which could be as messed up as it gets.

Due to these limitations, you’re perpetually reading Love You Dead with training wheels. You know Jodie will be caught. You know Tooth will get his just desserts. You know Roy will pretty much survive. Where’s the suspense?

A lot of this dichotomy could have been avoided by writing this plot as a standalone book. It would then not require Roy Grace to be involved — just a random policeman playing the good guy. The pages and pages establishing Jodie and Tooth’s backstory would actually fit. All the characters would be equally likely to win or lose (another typical trait of a thriller).

The only aspect in which this is a true-blue police procedural is the personal ups and downs of Grace’s family life. In the first book of the series, Grace’s wife Sandy had mysteriously left him, and he was left trying to understand what had happened. Through the various books, Grace has made peace with the unexplained incident, fallen in love again, and even had a son by his second wife. He’s settled in a house in the country, and finally seems to be living a contented life. But of course, that can’t last. A new twist to that plot happens in Love You Dead, and Grace is struggling again to make the right decision.

Love you Dead is deliberately written as a book in a series. I say deliberately because Tooth is a leftover thread from a previous book (as is the other villain Grace is initially chasing), and because  Grace’s personal life story stops at a personal-life cliffhanger here. For long-term fans of the series, it will be a fun few hours back in Roy Grace’s world.

For the rest of us travellers across various literary landscapes, this is a read-and-forget book.