To The Last Page

War and Morality The first thing that attracted me to this book was the setting. 1935 in Italian occupied Eritrea is an interesting time and place, not quite war time, but moving in that direction. The second thing that interested me was the title. The Italian perspective of the events that brought them into the war on the side of the Germans is complex and rarely covered in fiction, so a look at them from the view of a "good Italian" also promises an intriguing moral angle on the situation. Stephen Burke's novel doesn't disappoint on either of those questions - or at least not until the latter chapters that seem to bring some of the most interesting events leading up to the war in North Africa to a rather hurried conclusion. Initially however, there is indeed something Graham Greene-like about the moral position of Enzo Sacchi, a young man from Genoa who finds himself harbourmaster at the port of Massawa. With Italy about to expand their colonisation of the region, d...

Digging up the past There'll be a few eyebrows raised at the realisation that not only does Tom Thorne not get fired after the fiasco of his action in The Dying Hours , but he actually gets promoted. Or rather, reinstated back to his position as Detective Inspector. Billingham slightly glosses over this issue - investigation ongoing - but does present a kind of rationale for it. Thorne is needed for a very special task, a prisoner escort operation to locate a buried body that a serial killer has owned up to many years after his imprisonment. Thorne is needed because he's had dealings with the prisoner in the past. A guy called Stuart Nicklin. Having Thorne back as DI and bringing back Stuart Nicklin (from Scaredy Cat ) would seem like Billingham is returning to safe and familiar ground, but surprisingly, The Bones Beneath takes Thorne away from his familiar London stomping grounds for a very different setting - a small remote island off the coast of Wales, Bardsey Island. As y...