Dreamer, by Peter James

ISBN: 9781409181248
Amazon ID: B004BDOJZY

This is another one of Peter's early books, before he developed the Roy Grace series of "Dead" books.

It's written well and has a good story to it, but the central character is just so much one of those people who I could not stand to be around in real life that I did find it a bit hard-going.

This character:

• reads horoscopes
• works in advertising
• thinks clothes are more important than ability (although see previous point)
• employs a child-minder who is insanely superstitious
• thinks that dreams echo (or even predict) reality
• hosts dinner parties because "they're so much better than supper parties or cocktail parties"
• hosts dinner parties and can't stand the people who have been invited
• takes her six year-old son shopping and doesn't care in the slightest when he crashes a shopping trolley into someone else's, demolishes a stacked display of tins, and treads in another shopper's basket
• remains with a husband who leaves a shotgun together with cartridges lying around the house during a children's party
• employs a personal assistant who has her own clairvoyant
• dismisses this as ridiculous, but then later visits the clairvoyant for advice
• goes skiing with someone she has distrusted for years, who takes her and her husband off-piste in the mist, and follows him at 4 in the afternoon down an icy, narrow couloir with rocks, instead of following some piste markers she has seen along the way and could have used to take a safe route down

In chapter 7, one of the characters "wanted to swim badly today". I think it more likely that they "badly wanted to swim today".

Also, despite the title, far too much of the book is written as though something is happening, and then later it turns out to be a dream. I can clearly remember getting very poor marks in English classes at school if I ever tried to write stories in that style.

After a while, Peter decides to take this a step further and writes a scene which seems real, then the character wakes up and decides it was a dream, then finds out the bed they're in is a hospital bed and the event was real after all.

Around chapter 34 it seems like all the weird events are coming together and the real story might actually be starting, but unfortunately by chapter 41 it's clear that it isn't so. The weird events continue, and we still don't have any explanatory story.

Once you get to the end of chapter 48, there is no more book. There is no ending; there is no explanation for the weird events which have been happening to the main character; there is simply no more book.

This has got to be the most disappointing book of Peter James' that I've read so far. I sincerely hope that record doesn't get surpassed.

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