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Chasing the Dead introduces David Raker, a grieving widower who, using the investigative skills honed in his former profession as a reporter, now finds missing people. The book opens with a Coben-esque conundrum - David is tasked with finding the dead son of a friend, who swears she saw him very much alive, walking the streets of London a month or so earlier. So begins Dave’s journey/investigation, which goes from interesting to downright ludicrous. Ayo: Raker is quite a troubled person with a rather sad personal life. Were you determined not to make him “perfect” or were you just more inclined to fashion him after more “iconic” PI’s whose lives are somewhat troubled? Tim: Not as much as I’d like. I’ll be honest, when I’m writing a book, I don’t read at all. Not because I don’t want to, but because I find other books start interfering with my thought processes. I start to worry one of my characters is like one of theirs, or my story is the same as theirs, and it just makes everyone’s life – and I include agent, editor and family in this – a total misery. During my down time, I read as much as I can, though. I recently finished The Road on audio book, about five years after everyone else, and I’m currently ploughing through Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars.
Tim: I’ve just always grown up reading series characters, so the idea felt very natural to me. Authors like Michael Connelly were the reason I wanted to become a thriller writer in the first place, and I loved how Bosch changed from novel to novel. Each time he was slightly different. I also like the scope a series character gives you: you can build a world, and you can progress it, rather than having to build it all over again, every time. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to have a bash at writing a standalone because I very definitely would, but I like the dynamics of a series. To me it’s like different seasons of a TV show: the events of one season impacts on those that follow, changing the character you get to know so well, in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways.
Summary
Definitely not for the squeamish, this book is violent and gritty. How much can one human being endure before he's a broken man? David Raker is pushed to his limit. This is the third Tim Weaver novel I have read and I must say it was somewhat of a disappointment. In September 2015 I read and really enjoyed What Remains the sixth David Raker novel and in particular the London setting with the use of old wooden piers and the thrills and sounds of Victorian amusement arcades. Once again the story was well crafted and paced superbly. Snippets of information is revealed steadily and I had fun trying to work things out before it was revealed to me. While I didn't see some twists coming there was one thing that instantly set warning sirens off in my head. I wasn't 100% accurate but I did have some idea of what was coming.
Raker is once again enlisted by a family whose teenage daughter has gone missing. Using some unorthodox and sometimes illegal investigative techniques allows Raker to follow some seemingly random but ultimately connected leads to an unsolved case involving Milton Sykes who allegedly and notoriously murdered 13 girls a century before. It's remarkable how Raker is able to find these leads despite the police having a dedicated task force searching for the same missing girl. Then there are more missing girls, a paranoid Russian criminal and his personal plastic surgeon, and a dead police officer. But how are all these characters connected? Seventeen-year-old Megan Carver was an unlikely runaway. A straight-A student from a happy home, she studied hard and rarely got into trouble. Six months on, she's never been found. David Raker knows what it's like to grieve. He knows the shadowy world of the lost too. So, when he's hired by Megan's parents to find out what happened, he recognizes their pain - but knows that the darkest secrets can be buried deep. And Megan's secrets could cost him his life. Tim: Actually, I’ve never really seen David Raker as a PI, at least not in the traditional sense. He has some of those traits, of course he does, but the reason I made him a missing persons investigator and not a cop, or an ex-cop, or an ex-cop that’s now a PI, is because there were huge authors already covering very similar ground and I wanted something just a little different. Missing persons has a very emotional core: as parents, as children, as friends, we can imagine what it must be like to see a person you love dearly vanish into thin air, never to be seen again. How do you begin to cope with that when you don’t know if that person is even dead or alive? It’s loss, but a skewed sense of loss, and one with no closure. You can’t move on if you don’t have a body to bury. I thought that would give the books, and Raker himself, a bit of heart. That’s plenty of hardness in crime fiction, and you need that element – and that’s in the books too – but I wanted Raker to have empathy for the people who came to him, and be a kind of sympathetic action man. For me, he’s a psychologist as much as an investigator. Perfect plotting, great characterisation, and the kind of payoff that a thriller of this calibre deserves' Bookgeeks BELL, τη νέα πολύ επιτυχημένη σειρά, του Tim Weaver, με θέμα υποθέσεις εξαφανισμένων προσώπων. Το «Κυνηγώντας τους Νεκρούς» είναι το πρώτο βιβλίο της σειράς «Υποθέσεις Εξαφανισμένων Προσώπων», η οποία καθώς φαίνεται θα κάνει θραύση και στη χώρα μας! Πρόκειται για μια λαμπρή δουλειά από πλευράς του συγγραφέα Tim Weaver και μια εξαιρετική μετάφραση από τον αγαπημένο μας Βαγγέλη Γιαννίση! Ότι και να πω είναι λίγο, γι’ αυτό θα προσπαθήσω να είμαι σύντομη και περιεκτική. Θα προσπαθήσω είπα. Μην το δέσετε και κόμπο! ;-)Weaver ξεπέρασε των εαυτό του. Η γραφή του εξελίχθηκε σοβαρά και κατάφερε να μας προσφέρει ένα θρίλερ που διαβάζεται απνευστί και σε αφήνει άναυδο. Η ιστορία συνοπτικά έχει ως εξής: Ο Ντέιβιντ Ρέικερ, πρώην δημοσιογράφος και νυν ερευνητής εξαφανισμένων προσώπων, προσλαμβάνεται από τους γονείς ενός 17χρονου κοριτσιού, της Μέγκαν, η οποία έχει εδώ και 7 μήνες εξαφανιστεί, χωρίς η αστυνομία να μπορεί να βρει το παραμικρό ίχνος για την τύχη της. I have to think about one of the most well-known quote by Karl Popper, an Austrian and British philosopher, very often nowadays, that actually is a sad fact : A gripping plot, a creepy atmosphere and a mystic aura over it. At some point though I started to worry that it would turn into a paranormal story, so weird it was! Thanks God, no genre changing. But still, I found the second part of the book a bit too much: there were just TOO MANY life-threatening situations for one person in one book. I am glad that David managed to escape every time he was almost killed, but it started to get on my nerves and the whole "OMG" and "THANKS GOD HE DID IT AGAIN" became less credible.
Tim Weaver (born 1977) is an English writer primarily known for his crime thrillers featuring missing persons investigator David Raker. Tim Weaver said that he decided to write a series about a guy who investigates missing persons in the modern times because he finds it interesting that in this day and age with all kinds of cameras recording everything on every street at all times as well as all day and night news that people still go missing. He also thought that it was interesting how many stories there have to be when someone vanishes. Skillfully Tim Weaver has developed complex and compelling characters in this novel like observant, resourceful and tenacious David Raker who never gives up his search for Megan; police officer Colm Healey plagued by the loss of his daughter is vengeful, unpredictable, arrogant and resentful; and secretive Megan Carver, the unlikely runaway who’s a smart student and obedient daughter. Chasing the Dead is the debut thriller from Tim Weaver, the first in the chilling David Raker series.The Drum – Specsavers and Penguin team up to let crime fans create #youdunnit novella through social media". thedrum.com/. 13 September 2013 . Retrieved 18 November 2013.
Fans of the novel really enjoyed the way the author allows Raker to grow and change and you feel like you get to know him as the story goes on. Raker behaves like a real person in the novel going through things that real people go through and reacting the way a real person would. Some thought the mystery in the book was fascinating and was well built and worked the whole way through the novel to an amazing finale. Some enjoyed the way the violence was described, saying that it was a good just right and skillfully written. Some found themselves riveted to the writing and kept up until the early hours finding out what happened, and even liked how everything was concluded. Ayo: Were you a reader of crime fiction before you started writing it and if so can you remember the very first crime novel that you read? As before looking forward to seeing where Weaver takes this next. Learning more about the main character's life and how he's moving forward after a tragic loss is the obvious highlight but thankfully the cases he's working on aren't just sub-par filler and do keep me intrigued. DISCLOSURE: I listened to the audiobook of Chasing the Dead by Tim Weaver, narrated by Michael Healy, and published by Penguin, via Overdrive. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.With the growing popularity of Tim’s novels and given that he now writes full time, he is poised for great success. A case in point, Fall from Grace was the second biggest selling book in England the week in which it was released and Tim’s works has been nominated for a National Book Award and for the Crime Writer’s Association Dagger. Ayo: Your books make for exciting read and it is clear that an enormous amount of research has gone into them... MY THOUGHTS: Chasing the Dead by Tim Weaver is an excellent start to a series that I have been reading in a piecemeal manner. But despite the hundreds of people who went missing every day of every year, I'm not sure that I ever expected to make a living out of trying to find them. It never felt like a job; not in the way that journalism had. And yet, after a while, when the money really started coming in, Derryn persuaded me to rent some office space down the road from our home, in an effort to get me out, but also - more than that, I think - to convince me I could make a career out of what I was doing. Specsavers National Book Award – Crime & Thriller of the Year". nationalbookawards.co.uk/. 18 November 2013 . Retrieved 18 November 2013.
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