In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

Overview

“A stand-out thriller….[A] remarkable achievement.”
 —Chicago Sun-Times

Hailed as one of the UK's strongest contemporary thriller writers—the British Dennis Lehane—Mark Billingham may be the most exciting author to hit the noir fiction scene in years. With In the Dark, Billingham steps briefly away from his bestselling series featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne (Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat, Lazybones, et al) and delivers a powerful story of cops, street gangs, and career criminals that twists and turns into dark, unexpected areas. In the Dark is a magnificent achievement  by a modern master who’s been compared enthusiastically to Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and George Pellacanos, and whose latest novel, Death Message, has recently been named the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061432767
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/29/2009
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	4.18(w) x 6.82(h) x 1.20(d)

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