From The Dead (Tom Thorne Novels) - Hardcover

Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for Crime Novel of the Year, and has also won a Sherlock Award for the Best Detective created by a British writer. Each of the novels featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne has been a Sunday Times bestseller. Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat were made into a hit TV series on Sky 1 starring David Morrissey as Thorne, and a new series based on the novels In the Dark and Time of Death will be broadcast on BBC1 in 2017. Mark lives in north London with his wife and two children.

London gangster Alan Langford’s charred remains were found handcuffed to the steering wheel of a burned-out Jaguar, and copper Tom Thorne (The Dying Hours, 2013) quickly extracted a confession from Langford’s wife, Donna, who admitted to hiring one of Langford’s associates to kill him. A decade later, after being released from prison, she receives a photo of Langford in the mail, and he appears to be alive and well in some sunny seaside resort. At the same time, her 18-year-old daughter, who was placed with a foster family when Donna was jailed, has disappeared. Thorne is assigned to investigate, and people begin to die. Thorne and his creator are wildly successful in England, but this one has some problems. Plot convolutions seem endless and overcooked, and the attention to Thorne’s angst and his fraying relationship with his significant other causes the narrative to lag. But the pace accelerates when Thorne tracks Langford to Spain’s wealthy, dodgy Costa del Sol, and a surprising, if not fully satisfying, denouement plays out. --Thomas Gaughan