Denial, by Peter James

ISBN: 9781409181231
Amazon ID: B004BDOK3K

Some of the reviews of this book make it sound as though it's going to be quite good:

• A thought-provoking menacer that's completely technological and genuinely frightening about the power of future communications.
  • Time Out
• This compulsive story is a tale of the search for immortality… I cannot remember when I last read a novel I enjoyed so much.
  • Sunday Telegraph

A self-obsessed fruitcake has a son and raises him to be a psychopath. He turns out to be good at it. He regards failing to feed the fish in the garden pond as just as significant and worthy of his attention as leaving a "house guest", who he's trapped in the sauna (turned on), without food or water for several days.

He carries a specific coin around with him, which he uses to decide whether he's going to kill someone or ignore them.

Aside from a bit of Internet activity in the Prologue, there's nothing technological in the first 20 chapters at all. Even after that, there is very little technology at all.

Throughout, and to the end, it's a well-written book about a deeply unpleasant person. Recommended.

Chapter 10

"Her skirt was drawn provocatively high, revealing, or almost revealing (he could never quite make up his mind), an inch of bare white thigh."

Sorry? What?? If there's a visible inch of bare white thigh, then it's revealed. If there isn't, then it isn't - simple. How can you not be sure whether it's revealed or not if you can see that it's an inch of bare white thigh?

Are you not certain whether it's an inch? Maybe it's only half an inch - but it's still revealed; you're now just not sure whether it's an inch or not.

Chapter 93

He "scanned the cars … Seven were parked front-in. One, a blue Ford Mondeo, was parked tail-in"

Two pages later: "the Mondeo reversed out of its parking space and headed off down the drive."

Chapter 94

"The new cellar had a concrete ceiling eleven feet thick."

6 lines later: "Are you down here? Under nine feet of concrete?"

Chapter 97

"He gave the door a push, but nothing happened. Then he pulled and, with a deep sucking sound, it swung open slowly."

"Ten feet in front of him was another vault door, with the same locking handle as on the one he had just opened."

"Then he pulled. Slowly the door moved outwards."

Then, in chapter 102, someone on the inside of this door wants to keep it shut, and "…pressed all the weight he could against the door…"

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