Not Dead Enough: A Roy Grace Novel 3

by Peter James

NOT DEAD ENOUGH

I don’t often write reviews, that’s what I I figure Kindle notes & Goodreads are perfect for, feel something right in the moment and post it, otherwise you’ll forget it come the end. I call my rather unique mental scaffolding ‘the spidey web’, it, along with a Olympic sized swimming pool full of ‘little red fishies’ (red herrings) & of course myself, The Ego, spend the entirety of any book being read battling over a plethora of plot twists, guesstimating, maybes & hopefully semi hilarious puns & diatribe, although, be warned before you read, that sometimes I even scare myself. So without further ado…

Krimifestival M

Comme des Gar

Marlon did what he always did, which was to swim around and around his glass bowl, circumnavigating his world with the tireless determination of an explorer heading into yet another uncharted continent.

So cruel! He should have a mate, & I’m talking about the goldfish here! He also needs a bigger tank! I think their goldfish need to live together, as do they & I still have not forgotten about bunny boiler…

maybe even in love with –

It’s love

‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I hate highlighting parts everyone else seems to have, I always feel like I’m pushing in at a book club I don’t belong to, however… This is strangely true in many ways relatable up until today & tomorrow & the day after that, infinitum … tragedy, loss, hardship, discontent, etc makes me think of one of my favorite quotes ‘without darkness, there can be no light’ If you look at those famous, a good many if them have led haunted lives, despite their talent, their fame, something is cut off, incomplete, wanting… Look at Brittany Spears, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, Freddy Mercury I could go on & on but luckily for you, I won’t. I just think the inner pain gives a doorway to a part of yourself that others may not have. I know I’ve always loved music, reading & I also love to write, & I also have inner pain, although I think my pains probably a lot bigger than my talent that I never really bothered to nourish, the times I did do that words flowed, but life had other plans, c’est la vie

He had almost stopped smoking completely – after recently being shown, in the mortuary, the blackened lungs of a man who had been a heavy smoker

I was a very heavy smoker, had smoked since I was 12 or 13yrs old & I stopped for 2 reasons.. My Dad got emphysema The hospital I worked at was banning smoking on campus, & by that they meant any staff, found more than 3 times to of broken that rule, got fired, & they really did it. Obviously my Dad getting emphysema was a much bigger catalyst & I didn’t mostly quit, I totally quit, I think I tried one cigarette at old time, & I didn’t like it & put it out. Now I’m at the point I just don’t think about it, until something like this makes me think of it. I don’t see myself ever starting again. Oh yeah, & emphysema, it’s one nasty bitch.

Less than half an inch across. Terrifyingly tiny.

It always amuses me that although we have the metric system here, & a lot of other countries, some things still fall under the imperial, regardless of the country & what system they might adhere to. Medical is one area where it happens a lot.

The light woke up Al, his hamster. Even though one paw was in a splint, it did a sort of jump-hop into its treadmill and began running.

Cruel too, they shouldn’t be bred

he knelt, picked the orange and black creature up gently with his gloved hand and tossed it to safety.

Well, I already like him :)

It was as if some private demon that he normally carried in his soul had been banished.

Let me guess, it was his wife that was murdered ?…

plus fours

Just begs the question “why?!?”

it was about keeping Katie happy,

Yup, Ding ding Ding

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as their day’s going to get.

Heh

He knew all the models of just about every make of car on the planet, and carried most of their specifications and prices in his head.

What is it about people with super memories & this author, last book it was The Weatherman, Grace has a photographic memory, now this… talk about overload!

popped a couple of capsules from their foil wrapper and slung them into his mouth. Attempting to swallow them with just saliva, it felt as if they had lodged halfway down his throat.

I take a sheetload of pills daily, & even I wouldn’t try that!

This one was to an old sweat of a detective, Norman Potting – not a popular man among the team, but one Grace had learned, from a previous successful investigation, was a workhorse he could trust.

Yup, he’s the one that surprised me, especially as he was the one to ask about EJ, the only one, if I’m not mistaken

Helen Steele,

Googled her, apparently so, although a 5yr old could paint just as well, if not better. I like modern art, I like abstract art, but I’ve never understood how a painting consisting purely of however many lines of colored paint can sell for thousands, if not tens of thousands of $$!

Refurbished and modernized, it was opened in a blaze of publicity as the flagship, high-tech headquarters for Sussex CID, positioning the county’s force at the very cutting edge of modern British policing.

Heh, that reminds me of ‘the sky bridge’ at the hospital I worked at. Originally the campus had, besides all small little clinics, one big tower 12 stories high, but demand for surgery meant they put in a specialized surgical mini tower across from the main one. Then some bright spark decided spending MILLIONS of $$ to put a corridor/bridge connecting the two. So they did… It barely gets used, ever.

All people have two sides to their brains, one part that contains memory, the other that works the imagination – the creative side – and lying. The construct side. The sides on which these were located varied with each individual.

Like most people i knew the first bit about this, left & right, but always thought it was standard for everyone. I know my left is factual & my right is fiction, I find even if I do the trick on myself, I can feel my eyes, my brain reaching to either side, no clue if that’s normal, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t, I’m kinda on the wacky side at the best of times, trying to trick my own brains really pulling on that cord!

‘And anyhow,’ Grace said defensively, ‘I like Katie Melua.

I never heard of her, of course I googled her & omg Grace needs mental help! As in yesterday!

‘You know the best character trait to become a successful businessman?’ ‘Whatever it is, I wasn’t born with it.’ ‘It’s being a sociopath. Having no conscience, as ordinary people know it.

Very true, sociopaths are much more common than people think, mainly as their brains instantly thinking ‘serial killer’ when that’s not the case at all, some are, yes, but more are just people with no connection to anything else but their own desires & needs & feel nothing, no empathy, de nada. That’s why they’re good businessmen as they don’t care about anything other than success.

Except they hadn

Oooh I’m seeing TWOS….

No matter how clean it might be, the smell of death hung in the air, clung to your skin and your clothes, and repeated on you wherever you were for hours after you had left.

That’s because …. I just love to enlighten any poor people who may ever stumble upon anything I write who may not know this, after all, sharing is caring… What some people may not know, and I really REALLY wish I was one of them, is part of how we smell via our noses, we all know that much, right? Well whatever we may smell, tiny particles go in & up our nasal cavities & gets all snuggly cuddly onto all the fine hairs we have in there & thus we smell Whatever it is, good or bad… Sounds great on the yummy Sunday roast your Mum made, freshly brewed coffee, flowers… But maybe not so much on the Uber ride home when the last passenger threw up, or that dog poop you thought you’d fully scraped off your shoe… Have a nice day :)

a macabre ‘trophy’ cabinet, a display case filled with grisly items – mostly pacemakers and replacement hip joints – removed from bodies.

A lot of hospitals have a slightly darker souvenir box than that, one for items removed from people who got a little carried away when being ‘intimate’ either by themselves or with someone else. I’ll always remember one of them as ECC called my department in the middle of the night to get an instrument that may help with something that was a little tricky to remove. I won’t say what or anything else as we do sign disclaimers regarding patient privacy & even now I take that seriously, but I really felt for this person, I guess for any of them, the humiliation of having to come to hospital for something like this must be dreadful, but if anyone ever reads this (highly doubtful) at least they can know they’re not alone, it’s unfortunately more common than people think.

But at least in an operating theatre, people were driven by hope. In this room there was no hope, just clinical curiosity. A job that had to be done. The soulless machinery of the law at work.

That’s wrong, there IS hope in there as well! The hope they will find the one thing that will catch a killer, free an innocent suspect, save lives from knowledge gained from this death etc, I’d call that a whole LOT OF HOPE.

green pyjamas,

Scrubs, they’re called scrubs, please tell me they don’t really call them PJ’s? The full length green gowns are outdated here now, although they were fab in winter for staying warm, but now it’s all those yellow plastic gowns you saw when covid hit, they’re bloody hot, it’s like wearing plastic wrap, you literally sweat the entire length of your body wearing them, the public don’t understand how hard that is, all those people working through covid, wearing all that PPE they’re bloody hero’s for keeping that up.

Then Darren handed her a thin-bladed boning knife, a Sabatier that could have come from a kitchen cabinet.

People would be surprised at some of the instruments used in surgery that look like they could come from your kitchen, your garage, etc there’s not a lot of difference, say on a battery powered saw from your garage, or heavy duty pruning shears, bolt cutters, good for breaking through the rib cage :)

Nadiuska, holding what looked like a pair of gardening shears, began cutting through the dead woman’s ribs.

See? :)

a lone pigeon flew

Ugh I HATE pigeons, they’re the bloody bane of my life, wanting to take the food I put out for smaller birds, if I could kill them, I would.

Grace watched, with the same morbid fascination he had each time, as Cleo inserted the bag into Katie’s midriff, as if she were stuffing giblets into a chicken.

Never going to stuff anything again after reading this, without thinking about this!

Darren began the process of cleaning up the post-mortem room around Katie Bishop’s trolley. He squirted lemon-scented disinfectant on to the floor, scrubbing that in, then bleach, then Trigene disinfectant and finally Autoclave.

An autoclave is a machine, so this doesn’t make sense, unless those wacky Brit’s have named a cleaner after it…? Color me confused

Grace fell silent, thinking. He always found it easier to park his God questions safely away and to think about them only when it suited him. He wasn’t an atheist, not even really an agnostic. He did believe in something – or at least he wanted to believe in something – but he could never define exactly what.

I relate mostly to Pagan, the respect for our planet, other species, nature, just live a good life, treat others well, no matter what, it’d surprise a lot of people to really understand how rational & kind Paganism is, it’s not about dancing nude at midnight & praying to the devil, that’s for Wiccans… heh no, NO! That’s me kidding, Wicca gets bad hype too. But I can’t see myself trying magic, I did when I was way young but it just wasn’t my thing, Paganism though is, as it’s upfront & open to the fact that love & respect, honor & kindness, etc is what should be considered how to live, & I can’t see anyone saying that’s wrong or evil.

just in front of a pub where he sometimes bought Ecstasy in the men’s toilet at night. He might even have the cash to buy some this evening, if all went well.

That’s funny, as I wouldn’t of thought an H addict would care a less about E when in reality H takes over their life, it’s all they want, all any single $$ is for. Yes drug users ‘mix & match’ but drugs like H & Meth they’re all encompassing

Skunk’s head was shaven – by Bethany each time she came by – and there was a narrow, uneven stripe of hair running from below the centre of his lower lip to the base of his chin. Bethany liked it, told him it made him look mysterious,

Not even going to type what the slang term for that is

He had always been well aware of how easy it was to become complacent and forget things.

Very true, having a system & sticking to it verbatim is the best way to not make a mistake as your brain will recognize something is not right before you actually do. I did this at work when packing surgical instrument sets, & I made hardly any mistakes, when I did I was gutted & I think my bosses knew I hated it more than anything.

homophobia

homopho bia In this day & age, that ^ is not very acceptable, how the hell did it even get past auto check? It’s basically 2 incorrect words…

The only people who didn’t seem to go on holiday, in the same way that they didn’t stick to conventional office hours, were criminals. And himself, Roy Grace contemplated.

I have been, excluding the odd weekend away, & by odd I mean under 5 times in my life & a couple of trips to see relatives & again that’s 3 at the most… So other than ^that^ I went to Hawaii when I was 12 for a week. That’s it, & I’m older than I’d like to say. I now will never get to go anywhere, between being disabled & being on a pension for said disability, I can barely make ends meet, taking a holiday would be a joke!

Brighton and Hove had a hundred thousand vertical drinking spaces,

Is that a really odd way of saying bars? Or how many people can fit in all the bars if added together? Or what? As it’s just an odd sentence that doesn’t really make sense…

Beachy Head, a dramatic and beautiful white chalk headland, had the unwelcome reputation as England’s most popular suicide spot.

& if your in Aussie in Sydney it’s The Gap, very beautiful scenic cliff & walkway, very high up from the beach & rocks below, unsurvivable.

Maybe it was just in his mind. Maybe his mind just wasn’t working that well right now.

Or then again maybe he has a doppelgänger who’s been having a lot of fun at his expense

Operation Chameleon,

Well, I have a feeling that names going to have one hell of a lot of meaning than it is right now

Bristling with anger, Grace said, ‘Norman, that’s enough from you. I want a word after this meeting.

It reminds me of a twit that I worked with, who so embarrassingly while on the phone to theatre thought it was funny breast retractors were an actual instrument & giggled over it. I was bloody well embarrassed for her & what it made our department look like, the worst thing, she was our ‘training supervisor’. Yeah right, what a joke. That department started going downhill & never stopped, god only knows how many people get sick or worse medical conditions there now, as by the time I left nobody seemed to give a sh…

The only clues that anyone had been in here during the past few hours were a deep indent in the purple bedcover,

Does he have MPD? That’d be a freaky twist, not to mention a good one!

She had always reckoned she would be a good mother. Her own parents had been good to her.

& I’m the polar opposite

Naturally tidy, Sophie scooped it up into two piles, one comprising rubbish mail, one the proper post, and put them both on the shelf.

That I would of done.

And finally, with the sky gradually darkening outside her window, her day was starting to improve. She did not hear the key turning in the lock of her front door.

Damnit I like her :(

‘I’ve brought you a present.

Uh oh I don’t think I’ll EVER think of those words in the same way again, be it read or heard, thanks, so much Mr James.

Hell was Friday night in central Brighton.

I dunno about that, I think I’d match your bet & up you on schoolies week on the Gold Coast in Aussie, they go bloody nuts, every single one of them drunk, 1/2 naked (it IS the GC) & wanting to get laid. It’s insane, trust me I lived there for over 10yrs & without fail it’s the same thing yr after yr & probably always will be. Mind you I was no better when I was that young, oh the bad memories & the shame, & walks thereof…

and later on, the younger ones, high and drunk, would be starting to queue outside the clubs.

That’s one thing I never really had to do, being local, I don’t know if it was a good thing that ALL the bouncers from ALL the clubs knew me & my friends & we just bypassed the queues or not a good thing that I was partying way too much!