The Bones Beneath - Mark Billingham

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 you can probably guess, having Thorne and deadly serial killer Nicklin together on an isolated island, with limited communications with the mainland, is going to be a bit of a tense and dangerous situation. Particularly when you know that Nicklin has specifically requested Thorne come along, and that he has brought another prisoner along for motives that aren't immediately clear. There's clearly more to this than just a buried body.

In the afterword, Billingham confesses to there being a bit of himself in Thorne, but I think there might also be a bit of Nicklin in there as well. I'm not saying he's a serial murderer (although he is responsible for a number of horrible deaths in his writing career), but he does have a great ability to get into the heads of his characters, explore the cracks in their personalities and exploit them to great effect. That's the great strength about The Bones Beneath, even if you have some doubts about the viability of the plot regarding the security arrangements put in place for such a risky venture. There's a real battle of wits here between two complex characters, and there's more besides in the other strong secondary characters he has developed (although it seems Billingham still doesn't really know what to do with Helen Weeks).

Billingham is also successful in how he places Thorne in a new environment. Away from the London-based books, The Bones Beneath adopts a completely different kind of pace that emulates the undulations of the Welsh countryside, the unpredictability of the tides and the possibility of stormy weather. The plot runs pretty much along expected lines for the job in hand, but what makes it so readable is Billingham's writing and his ability to define characters and situations with a few terse words of exchanged dialogue and black humour. As well as the potential (certainty) of Nicklin's motivations being other than they appear, there are also the usual few unknowns weaved into the plot that promise a big twist. I'm not sure it's an entirely plausible one, but this is nonetheless a welcome change of pace for Billingham and Thorne.