Deal To Die For is the third book in Les Sandiford's "John Deal" series. 

Deal is a construction contractor just trying to make a living and keep his family together.  In each book, he finds himself in the middle of some kind of trouble.  Luckily his friend Driscoll is an ex-police detective, and between the two of them, they manage to set things right in the world.

In this book, Deal's life isn't very easy.  His wife is severely depressed, and he has a young child to care for.  And now it just got even more difficult, as his good friend Barbara has been found dead - an apparent suicide.  Barbara had been saddened by her own mother's death the night before.  And, she stumbled across evidence that her sister, Paige, had been adopted.  Still, none of this explains why Barbara would take her own life.  Deal certainly doesn't believe it so he and Driscoll set out to prove she was murdered.

In a seemingly unrelated story, some folks are making a porn film, specifically for the Chinese market.  Apparently, there's no such thing as good Chinese porn, and a small group of film-makers hope to change that.  This comes to the attention of some Chinese gangsters, who naturally want to do things their own way.

These two stories go on, separately, throughout much of the book.  In fact, they don't converge at all for a very long time, making one wonder when/if they'll ever get together!  The whole time I was reading the book I was intrigued by the first story, but couldn't care less about the second one.  After all, a grown woman just found out she was adopted.  Her mother just died, and now her sister has, presumably, killed herself.  There's a lot of material there, to keep me interested. 

But reading all about the making of Chinese-friendly porn... that just didn't do it for me.  These chapters were dull, overly long and detailed, and didn't hold my interest at all.  Were it not for the intrigue involved in the first story, I might have given up on this book.

In the end, the two stories do converge, but not in an overly satisfying way.  The boring Chinese porn story just dragged down the entire book.  I've read other John Deal stories, and been satisfied with them, but this one just didn't do it for me.  With loads of characters I didn't care about, and a story about the porn industry that I really didn't care about, this book failed to engage me.  I say "skip it".

Happy to be Lean-n-Mean!

Recommended: No