To The Last Page

Mark Billingham, in case you don’t already know it, likes to mess with the reader’s head a little. It’s not just for the sake of a neat little twist at the end of one of his thrillers, although he’s often quite effective at that, but it’s more in the way that he lays the ground for what develops. Their Little Secret starts out like a relatively straightforward investigation for DI Tom Thorne, but he suspects that there something strange lurking behind what seems like a common case of suicide, and since it’s a Mark Billingham thriller, you can be sure he’s not wrong about that. The seemingly ‘relatively straightforward’ and ‘common’ case of course turns out to be anything but relatively straightforward or common. It starts with the death of a woman throwing herself in front of an Underground train. Reviewing camera footage, there’s nothing to suggest that there is anything more to this than it seems, but Thorne has a bad feeling about it and attempts to look into what might have driven...

Considering some of the cases that Tom Thorne has covered in Mark Billingham’s series, you think he must have done something badly wrong this time to get landed with an investigation that involves interviewing old ladies about their dead cats. Leaving aside previous serious errors of judgement in Thorne’s past, one even resulting in a demotion, there does actually prove to be a good reason to take this investigation a little more seriously. For a start, we’re talking about over 300 cases of cats being poisoned and ritually mutilated, all within a relatively small area of north London. The implication and reason for Thorne being asked to return to his old stomping grounds north of the Thames are of course that the torture of animals is a behaviour that psychologists have recognised as potentially a precursor to serial killing. That’s something that DI Thorne is very familiar with, but he comes up here with an interesting new angle on an old theme. Having just met up with old colleague P...

One of Mark Billingham's great strengths as a writer of crime fiction has always been his ability to create and describe realistic characters from all walks of British life. Sometimes it feels like there are a few tokenisms thrown in there and a lot of unnecessary casual racist and sexist banter - particularly among the team in his Tom Thorne novels - but even if they are often unpleasant, there are realistic and identifiable character traits being played upon here and it's often for a definite purpose. It's through the use of some very specific English traits that Billingham often finds a propensity towards hatred, intolerance, bad behaviour that in some extreme cases can lead to criminal activity. It's a pity then that Billingham's signature DI Tom Thorne novels have been so inconsistent of late. Perhaps it's over-familiarity with characters that have overstayed their welcome, but the usually reliable characterisation seems to be increasingly let down by some...

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...

So how does Mark Billingham cope in his first (almost) standalone novel outside of his D.I. Thorne series? Pretty good, actually. On the surface the subject matter might not appear all that different – London mobs and gangsters and police procedural (or lack of it since his police officers often tend to work in an "unofficial" capacity) – but freed from the restrictions of the lead D.I.'s troubled private life and the increasing banality of the supporting characters over the last few Thorne novels, In The Dark is able to take Billingham's dark exploration of the criminal underbelly of London much further. It may not always make for pleasant reading, but Billingham's representation of the dangers on the streets of the UK today seems to be pretty accurate. Drive-by shootings, drug deals, street gangland initiations and larger scale criminal activities are all handled by the author with characteristic authenticity for both character and situation. Again, with a stro...

Thorne is back and so is Billingham – both back on form and continuing the upswing shown in Buried after the rather grim and downbeat The Burning Girl . Detective Inspector Tom Thorne still does some incredibly stupid things for a police officer of his rank in Death Message , having to strike a difficult balance between his personal life and the investigation of a series of brutal murders – but since a killer has involved him personally this time, he doesn’t have much choice. When he starts receiving personal text and video messages from a serial killer who is targeting a Biker gang and a couple of bent coppers, Thorne attempts to establish contact with the murderer outside of the course of the investigation. It’s a big risk, not only compromising the integrity of the investigation, but with the police authorities very interested in the case, he risks drawing unwelcome attention from his superiors. More than that, his decisions could put people close to him at grave personal risk. Tho...