โ Scribed by Mark Billingham
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
On a rainy city night, a handgun is fired at random. A struck car swerves and plows into a bus stop, killing an unsuspecting bystander. In an explosive instant, a cold-blooded gang initiation ends one life and forever changes three others: the desperate teenager who pulled the trigger . . . a policewoman on maternity leave . . . and an aging gangster plotting a terrifying revenge.
The truth about the shocking incident will tie them all together in a lethal blood knot. And nothing is what it seems.
In the Dark is the most powerful and unflinching crime novel yet from the remarkable Mark Billinghama gripping journey into the modern urban darkness where violence is both indiscriminate and meticulously planned, and youth gangs take on established criminals for rule of the streets.
Starred Review. 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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Fans of Billinghams Detective Inspector Tom Thorne will find this tale of a pregnant policewoman out to solve the killing of her copper husband thin gruel indeed. Thorne makes a couple of perfunctory cameos, but those appearances underscore whats lacking herefully realized characters whom readers will be moved to care about. Too often, protagonist Helen Weeks and the other players make ridiculous choices designed to move the plot forward. And what a plot it is: street-gang initiate shoots at a car, which then plows into Weeks husband at a bus stop, prompting his courtly mobster friend to eradicate the young toughs. The shooter, Theo, is a teenage dad from the projects who wouldnt have started dealing drugs if hed come from posh circumstances. Though readers know this, its astonishing (and not in a good way) when Weeks starts feeling and acting toward the young man in a way that suggests she, too, has been reading the book. Billingham has become a major player in the British crime-fiction world, but this is a definite misstep. Fans will stick with him, and libraries will need to have all the Thorne novels on the shelf. --Frank Sennett
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