Dead Simple

Mortuary, where I long hope to remain a day visitor rather than an overnight guest, my good friend James Simpson, my film and television writing partner, Carina Coleman, who acted as my unofficial editor and gave me some brilliant insights, Mike Harris, Peter Wingate Saul, Alan Tonks, Greg Shackleton, police surgeon and coroner Dr Peter Dean. And Helen Shenston, who gave me the faith and encouragement that kept up my enthusiasm for this book during my bleakest days.
    I want to thank also my wonderful new agent, Carole Blake, for her faith in me, and the fantastic team at my new publishers, Macmillan, in particular David North and Geoff Duffield and my editor Stef Bierwerth, who is a total treasure. And both Geoffrey Bailey and Tony Mulliken for their enduring support and belief in me. And, as ever, my faithful hound Bertie and my more recent canine friend Phoebe, who both tolerated my writing – albeit with some reluctance – as tedious interludes between their walks.
    Peter James
Sussex, England
[email protected]
www.peterjames.com

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either productions of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
    DEAD SIMPLE
    Copyright © 2005 by Really Scary Books/Peter James
All rights reserved
    First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
    St. Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
    www.minotaurbooks.com
    Cover art by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
    ISBN: 978-1-4299-5872-1
    A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The following is a bonus excerpt from DEAD MAN’S GRIP by Peter James

    AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2011
WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
    Facebook.com/peterjames.roygrace

1
    On the morning of the accident, Carly had forgotten to set the alarm and overslept. She woke with a bad hangover, a damp dog crushing her and the demented pounding of drums and cymbals coming from her son’s bedroom. To add to her gloom, it was pelting with rain outside.
    She lay still for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She had a chiropody appointment for a painful corn and a client she loathed would be in her office in just over two hours. It was going to be one of those days, she had the feeling, when things just kept on getting worse. Like the drumming.
    ‘Tyler!’ she yelled. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop that. Are you ready?’
    Otis leapt off the bed and began barking furiously at his reflection in the mirror on the wall.
    The drumming fell silent.
    She staggered to the bathroom, found the paracetamols and gulped two down. I am so not a good example to my son, she thought. I’m not even a good example to my dog.
    As if on cue, Otis padded into the bathroom, holding his lead in his mouth expectantly.
    ‘What’s for breakfast, Mum?’ Tyler called out.
    She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Mercifully, most of her forty-one-year-old – and this morning going on 241-year-old – face was shrouded in a tangle of blonde hair that looked, at this moment, like matted straw.
    ‘Arsenic!’ she shouted back, her throat raw from too many cigarettes last night. ‘Laced with cyanide and rat poison.’
    Otis stamped his paw on the bathroom tiles.
    ‘Sorry, no walkies. Not this morning. Later. OK?’
    ‘I had that yesterday!’ Tyler shouted back.
    ‘Well, it didn’t sodding work, did it?’
    She switched on the shower, waited for it to warm up, then stepped inside.

2
    Stuart Ferguson, in jeans, Totectors boots and company overalls on top of his uniform polo shirt, sat high up in his cab, waiting impatiently for the lights to change. The wipers clunked away the rain. Rush-hour traffic sluiced across Brighton’s Old Shoreham Road below him. The engine of his sixteen-wheel, twenty-four-ton Volvo fridge-box artic chuntered away, a steady stream of warm air toasting his legs. April already, but winter had still not relaxed its grip, and he’d driven through snow at the start of his journey. No one was going to sell him global warming.
    He yawned, staring blearily at the vile morning, then took a long swig of Red Bull. He put the can into the cup-holder, ran his clammy, meaty hands across his shaven head, then drummed them on the steering wheel to the beat of ‘Bat Out of Hell’, which was playing loud enough to wake the dead fish behind him. It was the fifth or maybe the sixth can he had drunk in the past few