In the Dark - Softcover

Mark Billingham is the author of the bestsellers The Burning Girl, Sleepyhead, and Scaredy Cat.

Actor Stephen Hoye is a graduate of London's Guildhall and a veteran of London's West End. An award-winning audiobook narrator, he has won thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards.

Fans of Billingham’s 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 what’s lacking here—fully 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 wouldn’t have started dealing drugs if he’d come from posh circumstances. Though readers know this, it’s 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