Brighton is the setting for Peter James’s mega-selling Roy Grace novels. Dead Man’s Grip (Macmillan, £18.99) is the latest, and sees him continuing to make formidable use of what is clearly an extensive body of research with Sussex’s police force. As a sort of Ian Rankin of the South, James takes the seaside delights of arguably the UK’s most relaxed city and flips them on their head. Here, we see the repercussions of what seems like a simple traffic accident reach as far as the US. The soap-style narrative of the police force runs excellently alongside the crimes that form the grit in Brighton’s oyster.
