This is a fantastic thriller, combining a gripping plot and lead characters of remarkable depth. Billingham is a multiple-award winner, and his books have sold more than six million copies. Readers who grab this one but aren’t familiar with its predecessors will be seeking them out. A series to savor.
Just when you think you might know what to expect from Mark Billingham, he throws you a curve ball and maybe a kitchen sink to boot ... Billingham does an exquisite job of keeping readers guessing while giving them more information than Thorne and DI Nicola Turner possess at any given point until (almost) the end of the book ... a terrific place to jump on the Billingham bandwagon. The mysteries here are straightforward and ultimately link up without fuss or strain, but with enough room to insert plenty of twists and turns, particularly in the final fourth of the book. You may see some of them coming, but by no means all of them.
s Billingham reveals at a moment guaranteed to catch the savviest readers off guard, the two fugitives have found each other and are locked in a larcenous folie à deux bound to claim more victims, including perhaps each other. The development of their unholy union, which has more layers than an onion, is so compelling that it shunts Thorne and his mates to supporting roles and virtually guarantees an anticlimactic ending. But Billingham, sweating both logistical and psychological details, creates a deepening sense of nightmarish surrealism along the way until Thorne has to acknowledge that 'there was very little about this case that wasn’t weird' ... An object lesson in how to take an established series into shockingly deep waters without losing the thread that keeps the franchise going. The detection that normally drives each entry is the least of this one’s dark appeal.
