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The body of a teenager, dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex, is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are recovered. Meanwhile, Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive an urgent liver transplant. When the health system threatens to let her down, her mother, Lynn, turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ – but at a price.

With his beautiful girlfriend, Cleo, and his recent promotion, Roy Grace knows he should finally be feeling positive, but this new case haunts him. Following clues from the bodies, he discovers a trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe.

Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter’s life…

This is the fifth in the Roy Grace series (previously titles in the series are Dead Simple, Looking Good Dead, Not Dead Enough and Dead Man’s Footsteps). Detective Superintendent Grace is a modern police officer: a down-to-earth, dedicated professional. But he is forever haunted by the disappearance of his wife Sandy nine years previously.

He uses every method available to investigate his cases and to trace Sandy’s whereabouts, from high tech to old fashioned police slog, from forensics and pathology analysis.

The buzzing city of Brighton, where Roy Grace is based, forms the backdrop to all his investigations. Behind the elegant regency façades and tacky seaside attractions lies a darker, seedier underbelly, inhabited by all forms of low life: drug dealers, crooks fencing stolen goods, premier league criminals and dropouts.

Peter James is one of the UK’s most treasured crime and thriller novelists. His Roy Grace detective novels have sold over one million in the UK alone and four million worldwide in total.

The series is now translated into 30 languages, including most recently Croatian and Hebrew. He has developed a close working relationship with the Sussex CID over several years and his writing reveals a unique insight into the reality of modern day police work. He has also carried out research trips with police in Moscow, Munich, Melbourne, New York and for this latest book Romania, as well as attending international police conferences to ensure he is at the cutting edge of investigative police work.

As part of his research for this novel, Peter spent time with some of Romania’s ten thousand street people, many of them children and teenagers living in caverns under the roads where the heating pipes run, or in appalling slums. For these teenagers virtually the only escape from this living hell is to put themselves unwittingly in the hands of the human traffickers for the sex market, the slave labour market and the international human organs market.

The background to this novel is Peter James’s discovery that there is a critical shortage of human organs for transplant in almost all western countries. In the UK, three people die every day because they are unable to obtain an organ – in particular a liver or heart - in time.

As a result a huge international black market in human organs has developed, with a healthy teenage or adult human body fetching up to $1m. Suppliers for this market include Russia, several Eastern European countries, China and Columbia.

In 1991 eminent UK transplant surgeon Raymond Crockett was struck off the Medical Register for 9 years for illegally buying four kidneys from Turkey. For years, the trafficking of human organs was considered to be an urban myth, but Peter James found out for himself, not only is it true but widespread, particularly with the proliferation of the trade on the internet.

Peter spends an average of one day every two weeks with the Sussex Police, either out on patrol, attending crime scenes, or in their offices. Peter is regularly present at autopsies at the Brighton and Hove mortuary and his studies of the criminal mind include observing inmates at Broadmoor, at Lewes Prison in Sussex, and regularly attending homicide conferences in the USA. He also works with the former Detective Chief Superintendent of Sussex CID to ensure the accuracy of his plots and research.

Peter, an established film producer and script writer, has produced numerous films, including The Merchant Of Venice, starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes. A TV adaptation of the Roy Grace series is currently in development, with Peter overseeing all aspects, including the scriptwriting.

Brighton born and raised, Peter James divides his time between his homes in Notting Hill, London and on the South Downs near Lewes in Sussex.

Don’t miss the exclusive serialization of Peter James’s new crime thriller Dead Tomorrow which will appear in The Argus, every day from Monday, June 1 to Friday, June 5.

Also, Don’t miss the exclusive interview with the Brighton author in the magazine. Only in the Argus on Saturday May 30.

Dead Tomorrow will be published by Macmillan on June 11th at £16.99

Click here to win signed copies of Dead Tomorrow.

To Read Peter James’s blog click here.