Time of Death (Tom Thorne Novels)

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Helen and Tom are on a much-needed vacation when Helen recognizes an old school chum on TV - the wife of a man just taken into custody for the kidnapping of 2 young girls. It's always there, hidden in a couple of sentences that don't particularly make sense, that you skate over in your rush to get on with the story. Like The Bones Beneath, which was something of a departure from the standard London setting of the novels, Time of Death also uproots Thorne to a different location and presents him in a somewhat unfamiliar situation. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Synopsis - Tom Thorne is on holiday with his girlfriend DS Helen Weeks, when two girls are abducted in Helen’s home town. Hint for all the brutal and corrupt fictional police officers out there – take your victim up a dark alley, alone, and check there are no CCTV cameras around. His standalone thriller IN THE DARK was chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by the Times and his debut novel, SLEEPYHEAD was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 books that had shaped the decade. I am a massive Billingham/Tom Thorne fan and actually wasn't looking forward to this 13th one quite as much as usual. Instead of going on the hoped for vacation, Tom Thorne ends up accompanying his partner Helen Weeks to Polesford, the small town she grew up in, after she learns that two schoolgirls have been abducted in the area and Helen's old school friend's husband is the prime suspect.And as with all good mysteries, as the story progresses, we follow blind alleys, eventually figure out who did what, and learn more about the detectives' own lives -- including Helen's past in this town. I read a couple of his early books a good while ago – ‘Sleepyhead’ and one other – but something about ‘Good as Dead’ put me off. The question is are they right and if so can they solve the identity of the killer before another body appears. In the last novel Thorne and cohorts had a horrible time - here we find him away with Helen for a holiday.

Sign up to the Little, Brown newsletter for news of upcoming publications, competitions and updates from our authors. This was a great crime novel and, for the first time and possibly due to slightly fewer characters than normal, I guessed the killer on their very first entrance, refusing to be swayed by the red herrings later left along the path.I would like to thank Net Galley for giving supplying me with an advanced copy of the latest Mark Billingham novel in exchange for a honest review. Unusually for a crime novel this book is as much about what happens to the family of a suspect when they are arrested as it is about the victims as well as the who, how and why element, and I really enjoyed it.

It was a bit of an inconceivable set-up, and the extent to which the two of them get involved in solving the crime (despite there being a supposedly competent local force who could/should do so) didn't quite wash with me. This leaves Tom at a loose end and he just can’t resist carrying out his own investigation – a true busman’s holiday. Yes, it did get better once Hendricks, Thorne's pathologist best mate, pitched up half way through and no, I can't say I've particularly taken to Helen, even though I now know much more about her.Linda and her children are put through hell on earth and it’s this which takes the novel into more unusual territory. And it was not a “cosy mystery” – which I rarely like – and there was not much graphic violence – which I also don’t like. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. La lecture de 'Time of Death' est très agréable, mais je n'ai pu m'empêcher de ressentir une certaine frustration à certains moments: une enquête dépourvue d'action, qui ne repose que sur des spéculations, une impression de remplissage avec des banalités, un manque de crédibilité quant au mode opératoire du coupable, . I had been knocking stars off my review in my head before it even landed on my doormat on publication day.