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Summary
Summary
Internationally bestselling author Mark Billingham's riveting new novel Love Like Blood marks the return of series character Tom Thorne, "the next superstar detective" (Lee Child), as he pairs up with perfectionist detective inspector Nicola Tanner of Die of Shame on an investigation that ventures into politically sensitive territory.
DI Nicola Tanner needs Tom Thorne's help. Her partner, Susan, has been brutally murdered and Tanner is convinced that it was a case of mistaken identity--that she was the real target. The murderer's motive might have something to do with Tanner's recent work on a string of cold-case honor killings she believes to be related. Tanner is now on compassionate leave but insists on pursuing the case off the books and knows Thorne is just the man to jump into the fire with her. He agrees but quickly finds that working in such controversial territory is dangerous in more ways than one. And when a young couple goes missing, they have a chance to investigate a case that is anything but cold.
Racing towards a twist-filled ending, Love Like Blood is another feat of masterful plotting from one of Britain's top crime novelists.
Author Notes
Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakstons Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel and also won the Sherlock Award for "Best Detective Created by a British Author." His books, which include the critically acclaimed Tom Thorne series, have been translated into twenty-five languages and have sold over four million copies. He lives in London.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Billingham's entertaining 14th Tom Thorne novel (after 2015's Time of Death) teams the formerly rule-bending London detective inspector, who's fighting middle age and an expanding waistline, with Det. Insp. Nicola Tanner, introduced in 2016's standalone, Die of Shame. When Tanner's life partner, Susan Best, is murdered outside the couple's home after a shopping trip, the by-the-book Tanner believes that she, not Susan, was the intended victim, retaliation for her investigation of a series of honor killings in London's Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities. Skeptical at first, Thorne agrees to help Tanner when a young Bangladeshi couple disappears, and Thorne suspects that the honor killings may be linked to a cold case from his past. Readers may wish for more tension from the contrasting styles of the two well-drawn leads, or that the main plot could offer more surprises, but one perfectly executed twist at the end will leave them eagerly awaiting the next in this series. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Billingham brings Detective Inspector Tom Thorne back (after Time of Death, 2015) for the fourteenth time in a team-up with DI Nicola Tanner from last year's stand-alone, Die of Shame. Tanner is on compassionate leave after the brutal murder of her partner, Susan. She fears the death sentence was actually meant for her because of her involvement in the Honour Crimes Unit. Determined to continue her investigations unofficially, she enlists Thorne's assistance. He finds his humanity sorely tested by the total lack of honour involved. Billingham's skillful plotting is everywhere in evidence here, and Thorne remains a compelling character, comparable to Connolly's Bosch and Rankin's Rebus.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HONOR-BASED VIOLENCE - which covers everything from beatings and kidnapping to mutilation and murder - is a scourge in Britain, where the Crown Prosecution Service estimates that the 12 or so honor killings reported each year are only a fraction of the true number committed in Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. In LOVE LIKE BLOOD (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Mark Billingham puts human faces on one such case, telling the story of Amaya and Kamai, two Bangladeshi teenagers who run away together to avoid arranged marriages. They make it as far as the London Underground, and the rest is pure savagery. "There isn't an ounce of anything like nobility in what these people do," Detective Inspector Nicola Tanner hotly informs her colleague Tom Thorne. "It's murder, pure and simple, pretending to be something else." Although "dishonored" male relatives are prime suspects in most cases of punitive violence, squeamish families often prefer to shop the job to a middleman with access to professional hit men - thugs like Muldoon and Riaz, who collaborate efficiently but whose cultural clashes can be morbidly funny. (Riaz enjoys Bollywood movies, while Muldoon is amused by these musical fantasies about forlorn lovers. "In a film or whatever, you get to sing about it," he observes, "but in real life you get the likes of us turning up.") Billingham allows his plot to wander down some pretty dark alleys. A friend of Amaya's is gang-raped, considered appropriate retribution for talking to the police. And it's disconcerting to learn that in Pakistan some honor killings can be forgiven by the victim's family, with no punishment for the murderers. But Billingham saves his real animus for the Metropolitan Police's Honor Crimes Unit, which receives 3,000 incident reports a year but doesn't have a website - or even a sign on the door. "There's a Royal Protection Unit and a Marine Unit and a big, hairy Dog Support Unit," Thorne notes, but nothing about an Honor Crimes Unit. "It's as if it doesn't officially exist." Which is what the victims assumed all along. DETECTIVE MANON BRADSHAW was endearingly klutzy in last year's "Missing, Presumed," by Susie Steiner. Since she's five months pregnant in persons unknown (Random House, $27), she's even more ungainly, but still endearing, in a novel that's nominally a mystery but is actually a smart and funny rumination on motherhood. Manon has returned to Cambridgeshire with her adopted 12-year-old son, Fly, to protect him from the indignities of growing up black in London. The irony is that the boy becomes a major suspect in the murder of a London banker who turns out to be the ex-husband of Manon's sister, Ellie, and the father of her 3-year-old son. Although the plot - involving the sleaze merchants of an international prostitution ring - is a mess, the racial theme cuts deep enough to hurt, and the characters are distinctive. Secondary players like Detective Sergeant Davy Walker, who lives to help others, and Birdie Fielding, a prize specimen of the Beatles' lonely people, are sweethearts. But since Steiner seems to judge all her characters on the strength of their mothering instincts, the Latvian gangsters don't get any love. MARGARET maron is one of those authors whose devoted fans would follow them anywhere. Now that she has retired her wonderful Deborah Knott series set in North Carolina, readers must head for New York City, the setting of TAKE OUT (Grand Central, $27), the final mystery in another series, which features Sigrid Harald. Lieutenant Harald's policing may seem old-fashioned, but that's because the novel's action takes place in the 1990s. When two homeless men are found dead on a bench, the detective learns they were poisoned by some takeout food. But this part of Greenwich Village is very neighborly and the locals, who include the widow of a mafia don and a former opera star, were always bringing them home-cooked meals. Which one was meant to die? And who delivered the lethal lasagna? Sigrid has a coolly analytic mind; it's sad to think we're watching her puzzle out her last case. aside from mounting surveillance with a nanny cam, will having an 8-month-old bébe cramp Aimée Leduc's ineffable style? The modish heroine of MURDER IN SAINT-GERMAIN (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other delicious Parisian mysteries by Cara Black must juggle motherhood with finding a nasty blackmailer, overseeing computer security at the École des Beaux-Arts and hunting down a Serbian warlord. This is Black's 17th Leduc novel, each set in a different neighborhood, and the formula still charms. Although the business of the warlord is a lot more interesting than Aimée's bread-and-butter cyber security jobs, finding a babysitter in July and August, when "toute Paris had disappeared," is even more challenging. The criminal elements of the story aren't taxing, but the abiding pleasure of this series is the chance to ride with a cabdriver who wants to discuss Sartre or just tearing around Paris on Aimée's pink Vespa, making stops at the Jardín du Luxembourg and the île Saint-Louis, where Aimée has an apartment. Lucky girl. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Guardian Review
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips; The Night Visitor by Lucy Atkins; Strange Magic by Syd Moore; Love Like Blood by Mark Billingham; Block 46 by Johana Gustawsson Gin Phillips's Fierce Kingdom (Doubleday, [pound]12.99) begins at closing time in a zoo in an unnamed American city, where Joan is trying to hurry her four-year-old son, Lincoln, towards the exit. When she spots the dead bodies and realises that the "fireworks" she heard earlier were actually gunshots, her focus shifts from trying not to be locked in overnight to keeping herself and her child alive. Over the next few hours, a deadly game of hide and seek is played out, seen from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints that include both the predators and their potential (human) prey. Tense and harrowing scenes make for some extraordinarily haunting moments -- such as the colobus monkey mourning its mate, and Joan's thoughts as she attempts to soothe her tired and fractious boy -- in a powerful, unsettling book. Lucy Atkins's third novel, The Night Visitor (Quercus, [pound]14.99), starts with a whoop-de-do launch party for an expected bestseller. The book in question, a biography written by historian and TV presenter Olivia Sweetman, is based on a Victorian diary that was discovered in a Sussex manor house. It was found by the intense, socially awkward housekeeper Vivian Tester, who has helped Olivia with her research but wishes to stay out of the limelight. This suits Olivia just fine, but Vivian is also keeping secrets about the author's previous deceits, which, if brought to light, could seriously derail her glittering career. These two well-drawn and plausibly flawed characters share the narrative in a complex, creepy and insidious novel about ambition, academic integrity and -- intriguingly -- dung beetles. The first in a projected supernatural crime trilogy, Strange Magic by Syd Moore (Oneworld, [pound]8.99) introduces benefit fraud investigator Rosie Strange, who has inherited the Great Essex Witch Museum from her uncle Septimus. The place is a nightmare of bad waxworks and damp, and Rosie, who doesn't believe in otherworldly hocus-pocus, is intent on closing it and selling the building, much to the dismay of curator Sam Stone. An eccentric professor throws a spanner in the works when he offers a reward if Rosie and Sam can bring him the remains of Ursula Cadence. Cadence was put to death in 1582 as a witch, but now her skeleton is urgently needed in order to release a boy from demonic possession. Finding it, however, proves easier said than done. Confident, down-to-earth Essex girl Rosie is an appealing character, and there is plenty of spooky fun in this spirited genre mashup, as well as a romantic subplot and folk history. It also raises serious points about how witch-hunting in past centuries had less to do with fear of magic than with scapegoating and misogyny. In his 14th Tom Thorne mystery, Love Like Blood (Little, Brown, [pound]18.99), Mark Billingham tackles a particularly repugnant contemporary method of controlling wayward women -- so-called "honour killing". When DI Nicola Tanner's partner, teacher Susan Best, is brutally killed at the couple's home, Tanner initially thinks it is a case of mistaken identity: she has worked with the Honour Crimes Unit, and believes herself to have been the intended victim. After being sidelined from the case because of her personal involvement and distrust of the official investigation, she confides in Thorne, naming two people she believes to be contract killers. Thorne later spots a link to a cold case from his past and agrees to help, which he does with his usual mixture of dogged determination, intuition and a penchant for bending the rules. This sensitive topic is delicately handled, with a perfectly executed and thoroughly unnerving twist at the end. French author Johana Gustawsson has won awards in her native country for Block 46 (translated by Maxim Jakubowski, Orenda, [pound]8.99), a time-slip narrative that alternates between Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 and modern-day London and Falkenburg, Sweden, where the mutilated body of jewellery designer Linnea Blix is discovered. Bodies with similar disfigurements have been found on Hampstead Heath, but as both are boys, the connection is by no means certain. Blix's friend, true-crime writer Alex Castells, travels to Sweden and, believing the local police to be on the wrong track, teams up with prickly profiler Emily Roy to solve the mystery. Back in 1944, Buchenwald inmate Erich Ebner finds himself working on a series of experiments on cadavers. We are not told exactly what they are, although one can assume that what Churchill called "perverted science" plays a part, but it soon becomes clear that they're the clue to what's happening in the present. The somewhat stilted prose and the constant switching of point of view take some getting used to, but it's worth persevering for a bold and intelligent read. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
DI Tom Thorne steps on more toes than usual to help out Nicola Tanner, a detective who's supposed to stay even further away from the case at hand than he is.Since Susan Best was nothing more than an inoffensive grade school teacher, Tanner is convinced the two men who squirted bleach into her eyes and stabbed her to death mistook her for Tanner herself, who was the dead woman's flat mate and lover. DCI Russell Brigstocke quite properly refuses to let Tanner work the case, so Tanner asks Thorne to take time out from his million other jobs (Time of Death, 2015, etc.) to look into the matter most likely to have made her new enemies: her work with the Honour Crimes Unit, which investigates the murders of young women whose Westernized behavior might have brought shame to their families. The HCU has focused lately on cold cases, but a hot one obligingly turns up: the murder of Amaya Shah, a Barnet College student found with her missing boyfriend's semen inside her. The activist Asian-English members of the Anti Hate Crime Alliance, Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus alike, bay for the blood of Kamal Azim, but the revelation that the missing boyfriend is actually gay persuades Thorne that the guilt lies elsewhereperhaps within the ranks of the AHCA itself. To a case that cries out for tact, delicacy, and cross-cultural sensitivity, Thorne brings bulldog tenacity, a gift for reading people, and a determination to devote his every waking moment to its solution, especially after a second attack leaves Tanner's flat in flames. Most readers won't be surprised by the resolution, but very few will predict the unnerving coda. His emphasis on the thorny issues surrounding honor killings allows Billingham (Die of Shame, 2016, etc.) to put a new and urgent spin on his tried-and-true procedural formula. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
London DI Tom Thorne (Time of Death) returns for another absorbing installment in Billingham's gripping police procedural series. Fellow officer Nicola Tanner (Die of Shame) returns, too, as she needs Thorne's contrarian intelligence to help solve a crime. Tanner is on compassionate leave: her partner was brutally murdered in their home, but Tanner believes that she was the actual target. She had recently been investigating links between two contract killers and possible honor killings in the local Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities, and is convinced that she was supposed to be the next victim. Her superior officers are skeptical, so she and Thorne pursue their own inquiries. Tensions are high, and when two young people go missing in what looks suspiciously like another honor killing, the stakes are raised substantially. Billingham brings the book to its conclusion with a stunning, surprising twist. Verdict Superior writing, credible dialog, and creative plotting drive this deftly crafted crime novel. If you haven't encountered DI Tom Thorne yet, this would be an ideal introduction. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/17; library -marketing.]-Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
They moved out of the shadows and across the road as the woman turned on to her front path. Quickly, but not too quickly, trying to time it right; heads down and hooded, ready to turn and walk casually away should anyone come along. A dog walker, a nosy neighbor. Emerging from between cars, they were coming through the gate as the woman pushed in her door key and one of them was calling out her name as she bent to pick up her bags from the step. They had the water pistols out by the time she turned round. She opened her mouth, but the words, the scream, were quickly silenced by the twin jets of bleach and a few seconds after she staggered back, blinded, and fell into her house, they were on her. Inside. The water pistols were shoved back into pockets and the bags that had been dropped just over the threshold were kicked aside, so that the door could be shut. Folders and files spilled out on to the hall carpet, a bottle of orange juice, a notebook, pens. They stood and watched as the woman spluttered and kicked out at them, inching herself across the floor towards the foot of the stairs. "Where does she think she's going?" "She's not going anywhere." Excerpted from Love Like Blood by Mark Billingham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.