Review by New York Times Review
Count on it. Whenever people lose faith in their political leaders, the popular culture reflexively responds by killing off parents. Younger heroes, from Harry Potter to baby X-Men, are easily redirected to reliable surrogate authority figures, but in troubled times mature protagonists like police officers and lone-wolf detectives are more often left reeling from the deaths of fathers and the treachery of mentors. Mark Billingham, who writes gritty police procedurals featuring Tom Thome, a detective with the London police, dives directly into the spirit of the times with BLOODLINE (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which examines the volatile parent-child dynamic from an unexpected angle. On the most conventional level, Thorne's personal hopes of getting married and becoming a father are dashed when his lover discovers that the baby she's carrying "is not viable." But the counterweight to this facile narrative point is a psychologically twisted and strikingly original plot involving the legacy of a serial killer, Raymond Garvey, who killed seven women in four months and died of a brain tumor in prison. Now, 15 years later, someone is murdering the grown children of Garvey's victims, presenting Thorne and his colleagues on the murder squad with the daunting task of finding and protecting these survivors, some still too traumatized to look out for themselves. To make the job even more complicated, a man claiming to be Garvey's son has raised a troubling question: whether the brain trauma that altered Garvey's personality might absolve him of responsibility for his crimes. The relentlessly swift pace and high emotional pitch of the narrative may say "thriller," but Billingham has become too sophisticated a writer to settle for the cheap theatrics that galvanized his early novels. Grim as it is, the violence serves a purpose, making us consider all the innocent people whose lives are touched and often crushed in the aftermath of a crime. In one sensitively written scene after another, Billingham probes the lives of the "other victims" of the homicides, from bereft parents to kindly neighbors to perfect strangers. "He knows that it will pass eventually," Billingham says of a conductor who falls into a deep depression after two people are killed under the wheels of his train. "Anyway, he would worry about what kind of a man he was if he was not changed by it." Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they're tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair. As alienated antiheroes go, they don't get any darker than the protagonist of THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who calls himself Christian and is, in fact, dying. Although he often sounds like a poet, Christian isn't much for human emotions. But he does take pride in doing a "clean" job, and it's a professional affront when an unknown assassin steps between Christian and his designated target and botches the kill. Even as he piles up the images of impending death and decay, Sallis deals Christian a final twist of fate - the creature connections he has spent his life running away from. Dale Sayles, a Phoenix homicide detective whose life is no bowl of cherries, finds himself commiserating with the dying hit man because his own wife has just gone into a hospice. More inexplicably, an abandoned boy named Jimmie has been dreaming the killer's dreams. All three share the essential human bond of loss. "People leave us," Jimmie tells himself. "All our lives are a going-away." Maureen Jennings has always had a keen eye for marginalized members of society in critical need of a champion. (In a series of historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, she has even sent her big-hearted police detective, William Murdoch, into battle on behalf of mistreated animals.) The detective she introduces in SEASON OF DARKNESS (McClelland & Stewart, $22.95), which takes place in England a year into World War II, lacks Murdoch's highly developed sense of social injustice. But as the only police inspector in his insular Shropshire village, Tom Tyler can still identify those who could use his protection, including a contingent of young Land Girls who have come to work on the farms. When one of them is murdered, and then another, Tyler finds himself torn between loyalty to his neighbors and his sense of duty - a conflict that could easily take a Tom Tyler series through the end of the war. Readers who lament the loss of Henning Mankell's great Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, can still get their fix of Scandinavian gloom from the novels of Kjell Eriksson. THE HAND THAT TREMBLES (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $24.99) offers compassionate insights into the minds of people who tend to brood during those long winter nights. Ann Lindell, a conscientious cop based in the cathedral city of Uppsala, considers the human foot that has washed up on a remote beach and wonders why the handful of people who live in this isolated region don't die of loneliness. But even those who manage to escape - like the respected Uppsala county commissioner who simply walked out of a meeting and disappeared - take their melancholy thoughts with them. And while the two narratives don't really mesh, Ebba Segerberg's translation of Eriksson's austere prose beautifully captures the spiritual chill of this desolate landscape. Does the brain trauma that altered a killer's personality absolve him of responsibility for his crimes?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 21, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
A woman is bludgeoned to death in her London home. It appears to an ordinary murder, except for the small bit of X-ray film clutched in her hand. Inspector Tom Thorne gets the case, and additional victims turn up, all clutching a similar piece of film. The pieces prove to be from a cranial X-ray of the infamous Raymond Garvey, who killed seven women 15 years before. Thorne learns that each victim is the child of one of Garvey's victims, and each murder proves that the killer is diabolically clever. Plot twists and red herrings abound in this ninth Thorne novel (following Death Message, 2009), but readers new to the series may wonder if the moody, taciturn inspector is coming apart at the emotional seams. His lover's miscarriage has hit him hard, and his normal frustrations with police bureaucracy and politics seem ready to boil over. Thorne withdraws into himself, and that diminishes the role of some of Billingham's other ongoing, also engaging characters. It all adds up to a somewhat murky new addition to a successful series.--Gaughan, Thoma. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Billingham's thrilling eighth crime novel featuring London police detective Tom Thorne (after Death Message), Thorne welcomes the distraction of a new case after his girlfriend, Det. Insp. Louise Porter, suffers a miscarriage. When Emily Walker is found beaten and suffocated with a plastic bag in her Finchley home, she appears to be the victim of a domestic dispute-until Thorne learns that a 23-year-old nurse was similarly beaten and suffocated three weeks earlier in Leicester City. Thorne and his team discover that both women's mothers were murdered 15 years earlier by psychopath Raymond Garvey, who killed seven women in four months and later died in prison of a brain tumor. As the body count rises, it's obvious a copycat killer is now targeting the children of Garvey's victims. Thorne's private struggles to process the loss of his unborn child and snippets from the lives of the present-day killer's victims lend poignancy. Billingham continues to captivate with equal parts suspense, deduction, and heart. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
DI Tom Thorne volunteers for a case that turns out to be the work of yet another serial killer as inventive as he is depraved.Suffocating a victim to death after conking her senseless with a blunt instrument isn't by any means a common modus operandi, and it's not long before DS Paul Brewer links the London murder of Emily Walker to the very similar death of Catherine Burke in Leicester three weeks earlier. A third and fourth killing make it clear that the case is open-ended. It's even more startling and disturbing, however, to see what the victims have in common: They're all children of murder victims, the seven people who were killed 15 years ago by Raymond Garvey. Garvey, who died in prison, is safely out of the picture, but someone calling himself Anthony Garvey and identifying himself as the monster's son shows every sign of carrying on the family business. Thorne takes on the assignment at least partly to insulate himself from the news that his own child with DI Louise Porter is never going to be born. But his own traumatic burden keeps Thorne, never a paragon at the brightest of times (Death Message,2009, etc.), from doing his best work, and the killer not only continues to elude the Metropolitan Police despite leaving pounds of forensic evidence at the crime scenes but pulls a major con by manipulating the Met into flushing out the last few victims on his list.Middling detective work, a compelling villain and the author's usual sensitivity to men and women pushed to the edge by their compulsions, their work or their families.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
