In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

Overview

A Deadly Crash

A rainy night in south London. A gun is fired into a car, which swerves onto the pavement and plows into a bus stop. It seems that a chilling gang initiation has cost the life of an innocent victim. But the reality is far more sinister. . . .

A Dangerous Quest

One life is wiped out and three more are changed forever: the young man whose finger was on the trigger, the ageing gangster planning a deadly revenge, and the pregnant woman who struggles desperately to uncover the truth. How will she, two weeks away from giving birth, now cope in a world where death is an occupational hazard?

A Shocking Twist

In a city where violence can be random or meticulously planned, where teenage gangs clash with career criminals and where loyalty is paid for in blood, nything is possible. Secrets are uncovered as fast as bodies, and the story's final twist is as breathtakingly surprising as they come.

Mark Billingham's first stand-alone thriller, In the Dark is his most powerful novel yet. Gritty, fierce, and moving, here is a must-read for anyone who likes their crime fiction unflinching—and unforgettable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061982118
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	840,019
File size:	757 KB

About the Author

Mark Billingham is the author of nine novels, including Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat, Lazybones, The Burning Girl, Lifeless, and Buried—all Times (London) bestsellers—as well as the stand-alone thriller In the Dark. For the creation of the Tom Thorne character, Billingham received the 2003 Sherlock Award for Best Detective created by a British writer, and he has twice won the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. He has previously worked as an actor and stand-up comedian on British television and still writes regularly for the BBC. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Excellent.... Billingham does for South London what Richard Price does for Manhattan's Lower East Side in Lush Life." —-Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Editorial Reviews

The line between cop and criminal becomes dangerously blurred in Billingham's excellent stand-alone thriller. Told from multiple points-of-view and full of red herrings, the story begins in the London suburbs with a gang initiation. Hoping to climb the ranks in a local gang and egged on by his friends, 17-year-old Theo Shirley fires a gun into a woman's car on a rainy night. The woman isn't killed, but her car plows into a crowded bus stop, killing Det. Sgt. Paul Hopwood. Paul's pregnant girlfriend, Det. Constable Helen Weeks, also a member of the Metropolitan Police, can't accept that his death was an accident. She retraces his footsteps and discovers unsettling connections between Paul and Frank Linnell, a powerful player in the shadowy London underworld with his own reasons for unraveling Paul's death. Best known for the Det. Insp. Tom Thorne series (Buried, etc.), Billingham does for South London what Richard Price does for Manhattan's Lower East Side in Lush Life. (Oct.)

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Publishers Weekly

Billingham's (Death Message; Buried) first stand-alone thriller is aptly titled, as both readers and characters are in the dark through most of the story. The novel revolves around an incident that takes place one dark London night when a gang initiation gone wrong results in the death of a police officer. His wife, Helen, nine months pregnant and also a police officer, discovers some strange things in his effects and begins to poke around in his recent work, which leads her to fear she didn't know her husband well at all. Meanwhile, the gang responsible for the death is being gunned down in its South London territory, and neither the police nor the gang knows who is responsible. Billingham writes sensitively and sympathetically about both the pregnant wife and the gang initiate while keeping the tension high with suspenseful plot twists. Readers of the genre will enjoy this somber and clever mystery.
—Lisa O'Hara

Library Journal

Billingham's series sort-of-hero, DI Tom Thorne (Buried, 2007, etc.), has to settle for a supporting role, practically a walk-on, in this tangled tale of what happens after an aspiring gang member shoots into a car in London. Theo Shirley is ready to move up. Now that he's sold enough drugs to support a girlfriend and a baby son, his mate Easy Dennison offers him a boost up the next rung of the ladder. As part of his initiation, Theo's taken out one night in a car without headlights. When the driver of a BMW flashes her lights at his car, he's ordered to shoot into her back seat, and his target, Sarah Ruston, runs her BMW into a bus stop. The result is disaster for another unlikely family: DS Paul Hopwood and his girlfriend Helen Weeks, who's carrying a baby that may or may not be his. Relations have been cool between Paul and Helen ever since he found out about the fling she had at a particularly inopportune time. Now they're never going to warm up again. It's a sad story of random gang violence, but not, it seems, an uncommon one-except for a series of dark revelations. First, the accident may have had less to do with drugs than an internal investigation by the police; second, there's a growing suspicion that the freak accident may not have been so accidental after all; third, somebody is evidently closing the case a step ahead of the authorities by killing the friends in Theo's gang, leaving him the odd man out in more ways than one. The detection is hit or miss-mostly miss-but Americans who think the bleak world George Pelecanos brings to life is limited to the nation's capital will find Billingham's atmospheric maze of London byways just as sprawling and squiggling with desperatecops and robbers.

Kirkus Reviews

"Excellent.... Billingham does for South London what Richard Price does for Manhattan's Lower East Side in Lush Life." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the Publisher