Good As Dead by Mark Billingham
Oct. 15th, 2014 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
The hostage.
Police officer Helen Weeks walks into her local newsagent’s on her way to work. It’s the last place she expects to be met with violence, but she is about to come face to face with a gunman.
The demand.
The hostage-taker is desperate to know what happened to his beloved son, who died a year before in youth custody. By holding Helen at gunpoint, he will force a re-investigation into his son’s death. And one man knows the case better than any other – DI Tom Thorne.
The twist.
As the body count rises, Thorne must race against time to bring a killer to justice and save a young mother’s life.
First seen in IN THE DARK, DS Helen Weeks now has an energetic one-year-old son, Alfie, and she’s back at work in the Child Protection Unit. When she visits her local newsagent on her way to work, the last thing she expects is to be taken hostage by him. But Javed Akhtar is a man on a mission. His son, Amin, recently died in a young offender’s institution – having been jailed for manslaughter and while the death was ruled a suicide, Javed’s convinced he was murdered. DI Tom Thorne was responsible for Amin’s conviction, so Javed wants him to find Amin’s killer. Thorne finds himself in a race against time to discover the truth when the body count starts to rise …
The tenth in Mark Billingham’s TOM THORNE SERIES is another page-turning thriller that shows Thorne once again prepared to break the rules to get the result he knows is right. The problem is that the conspiracy element to the story never convinced me because it’s so dependent on a contrived set of events that didn’t ring true. This is a shame because I really enjoyed the return of Helen Weeks who’s struggling to keep her head in a stressful situation and whose conversations with Javed really bring out the pain and loss that comes when the justice system acts unfairly. I also enjoyed the way Thorne continues to develop here now that his relationship with Louise is over and the way in which he is looking to reorder his life to make a new start and yet cannot escape his old habits. Ultimately, this was entertaining enough to keep me reading but it wasn’t the best in the series – although I will definitely check out the next book.
The best scenes in the book for me were those between Javed and Helen. There’s a knife edge tension here, particularly due to Javed’s emotional unpredictability and desperation and Billingham does a great job of showing Helen’s attempts to build rapport in line with her training while also worrying about her own son. Thorne’s investigation rockets along at a tremendous pace with the depiction of life inside a young offender’s institution playing out in a credible way while avoiding easy cliché. As always, there are some very funny lines in the book, which stop it from becoming too bleak and I still like the banter between Thorne and Hendricks.
The Verdict:
The tenth in Mark Billingham’s TOM THORNE SERIES is another page-turning thriller that shows Thorne once again prepared to break the rules to get the result he knows is right. The problem is that the conspiracy element to the story never convinced me because it’s so dependent on a contrived set of events that didn’t ring true. This is a shame because I really enjoyed the return of Helen Weeks who’s struggling to keep her head in a stressful situation and whose conversations with Javed really bring out the pain and loss that comes when the justice system acts unfairly. I also enjoyed the way Thorne continues to develop here now that his relationship with Louise is over and the way in which he is looking to reorder his life to make a new start and yet cannot escape his old habits. Ultimately, this was entertaining enough to keep me reading but it wasn’t the best in the series – although I will definitely check out the next book.
Police officer Helen Weeks walks into her local newsagent’s on her way to work. It’s the last place she expects to be met with violence, but she is about to come face to face with a gunman.
The hostage-taker is desperate to know what happened to his beloved son, who died a year before in youth custody. By holding Helen at gunpoint, he will force a re-investigation into his son’s death. And one man knows the case better than any other – DI Tom Thorne.
As the body count rises, Thorne must race against time to bring a killer to justice and save a young mother’s life.
First seen in IN THE DARK, DS Helen Weeks now has an energetic one-year-old son, Alfie, and she’s back at work in the Child Protection Unit. When she visits her local newsagent on her way to work, the last thing she expects is to be taken hostage by him. But Javed Akhtar is a man on a mission. His son, Amin, recently died in a young offender’s institution – having been jailed for manslaughter and while the death was ruled a suicide, Javed’s convinced he was murdered. DI Tom Thorne was responsible for Amin’s conviction, so Javed wants him to find Amin’s killer. Thorne finds himself in a race against time to discover the truth when the body count starts to rise …
The tenth in Mark Billingham’s TOM THORNE SERIES is another page-turning thriller that shows Thorne once again prepared to break the rules to get the result he knows is right. The problem is that the conspiracy element to the story never convinced me because it’s so dependent on a contrived set of events that didn’t ring true. This is a shame because I really enjoyed the return of Helen Weeks who’s struggling to keep her head in a stressful situation and whose conversations with Javed really bring out the pain and loss that comes when the justice system acts unfairly. I also enjoyed the way Thorne continues to develop here now that his relationship with Louise is over and the way in which he is looking to reorder his life to make a new start and yet cannot escape his old habits. Ultimately, this was entertaining enough to keep me reading but it wasn’t the best in the series – although I will definitely check out the next book.
The best scenes in the book for me were those between Javed and Helen. There’s a knife edge tension here, particularly due to Javed’s emotional unpredictability and desperation and Billingham does a great job of showing Helen’s attempts to build rapport in line with her training while also worrying about her own son. Thorne’s investigation rockets along at a tremendous pace with the depiction of life inside a young offender’s institution playing out in a credible way while avoiding easy cliché. As always, there are some very funny lines in the book, which stop it from becoming too bleak and I still like the banter between Thorne and Hendricks.
The Verdict:
The tenth in Mark Billingham’s TOM THORNE SERIES is another page-turning thriller that shows Thorne once again prepared to break the rules to get the result he knows is right. The problem is that the conspiracy element to the story never convinced me because it’s so dependent on a contrived set of events that didn’t ring true. This is a shame because I really enjoyed the return of Helen Weeks who’s struggling to keep her head in a stressful situation and whose conversations with Javed really bring out the pain and loss that comes when the justice system acts unfairly. I also enjoyed the way Thorne continues to develop here now that his relationship with Louise is over and the way in which he is looking to reorder his life to make a new start and yet cannot escape his old habits. Ultimately, this was entertaining enough to keep me reading but it wasn’t the best in the series – although I will definitely check out the next book.
