There is something to be mined here about how personal desperation can evolve into professional upheaval.

So here we have the groom buried in a coffin in the woods and supposedly all the people who knew about it are dead. One problem: The van the pals are in crashes and they all die. Lest you think this is heartless, don’t worry, they left him a straw to breathe through and gave him a walkie-talkie so they can taunt him. It turns out the groom’s friends - and I use the term “friends” loosely - decide to get revenge on his past pranks by throwing him into a coffin and burying him in the woods. He signs on as an officially unofficial consultant for his buddy Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson (Richie Campbell), to help him solve a missing persons case of a groom-to-be who disappeared on his stag night (aka a bachelor party). Grace, of course, does not go gently into that good night. Oooh, you’re thinking - cops and mediums? Yeah, that’s straight out of “Unsolved Mysteries” and pretty bonkers. The woo-woo of it all makes the front page of the tabloids the next day, and Grace’s boss asks him to do his damnedest to avoid public drama for a while. Let’s rewind: “Dead Simple” opens with Grace on the stand, defending why - for a second time - he has consulted a medium to help solve a crime. (Let’s put it this way, he can sell this line: “A stag night is one thing, but you don’t decide to take a coffin on the spur of the moment.”)Įxecs from ViacomCBS, BritBox, and Vuulr Join Panel on Global Content Discovery and Curation Who”) as Grace that things don’t go totally off the rails.

The plot of the BritBox version is truly insane, apparently much like the book, and it’s only thanks to the solid, empathetic performance of John Simm (“Trauma,” “Dr. Judging by these reviews, “Dead Simple,” as it turns out, has been very faithfully adapted by BritBox - the online streaming service co-owned by the BBC and ITV - as an entry into its original programming roster. For the unfamiliar, let me share a sampling of the Amazon reviews for 2005’s “Dead Simple,” the first novel in his 16-book series starring Detective Superintendent Roy Grace: British crime author Peter James is an unqualified success: He’s written 36 novels and sold more than 20 million copies of those books, which have been translated into 37 languages.

Dead simple book review