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Summary
Summary
Some fires never go out ...
X marks the spot -- and when that spot is a corpse's naked back and the X is carved in blood, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is in no doubt that the dead man is the latest victim of a particularly vicious contract killer. It's morbid and messy -- but it's a mystery with plenty of clues. This is turf warfare between North London gangs. Organized crime boss Billy Ryan is moving into someone else's territory, and that someone is ready to stand up for what he believes is his.
Thorne's got plenty on his plate when he agrees to help out ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain rake through the ashes of an old case that has come back to haunt her. Schoolgirl Jessica Clarke was lit on fire twenty years ago. Now, Gordon Rooker, the man Chamberlain put away for the crime, is up for parole, and it seems there's a copycat on the prowl.
Or perhaps it's someone trying to right a serious wrong: Jessica Clarke was the victim of mistaken identity. The intended target was the daughter of a gangland boss, a woman who would grow up to marry the current leader, Billy Ryan ...
Thorne quickly identifies a tenuous link between the two crimes, and past and present fuse together to form a new, horrifying riddle. One that involves more killings, violence, greed, and a murderous family with no values -- except gain at any price.
When an X is carved into his front door, Tom Thorne realizes that fires, once thought to be out, continue to burn.
Author Notes
Mark Billingham was born in Birmingham, England on July 2, 1961. He worked as an actor, a TV writer, and stand-up comedian before writing his first novel, Sleepyhead, which was published in 2001. His other works include the Tom Thorne series, In the Dark, and the Triskellion series, which he writes under the pseudonym Will Peterson.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The engrossing fourth novel by British TV writer Billingham to feature London police detective Tom Thorne (after 2004's Lazybones) has a solid, traditional structure and plot, and a whiff of noir sensibility. Thorne is the solid reliable cop whom witnesses trust and colleagues appreciate. Of late, he's taken in his temporarily homeless pal, pathologist Phil Hendricks, and Billingham has fun with this odd couple (Phil is gay, messy and heavily pierced; Thorne is a Lucinda Williams-loving neatnik). Thorne's also willing to help out another friend-prickly, middle-aged ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain-who's uncovered new evidence about a case from the 1980s in which a schoolgirl was set on fire. Moral complexity clouds the picture: the man wrongly imprisoned for that heinous act is a career criminal; empathetic Thorne drifts into an affair with a key witness. A second case, equally complex, involves the murder of a Turkish video store owner, which proves to be just one of an alarming series of killings whose pattern Thorne must determine. Billingham delivers an edgy, ambitious novel with an excellent cast-just as BBC America's Mystery Monday offers a character-driven alternative to the current spate of forensics-heavy American TV police procedurals-and Morrow's betting on this one, with its hardcover-at-a-paperback-price, to break him out big. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Gangland killings, bureaucratic backstabbing, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne in a downbeat mood--what else is new? Leading, as ever, one of those lives of quiet desperation, Thorne finds his fourth outing (Lazybones, 2004, etc.) launched with a phone call from someone as melancholic as he is. Ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain is having to contend with slimy Gordon Rooker, or, rather, with someone pretending to be Gordon Rooker, since, in fact, the real Gordon Rooker is doing 20 years in Park Royal Prison for setting fire to schoolgirl Jessica Clarke. The crime, heinous and harrowing enough, gains extra ugliness when it turns out that Jessica was the wrong schoolgirl. Contract killer Rooker mistook Jessica for Alison Kelly, standing next to her, and thereby hangs a tale of economic rivalry, the Kellys being at the time preeminent among North London racket folk. In other words, a message was being sent about turf warfare in the making. But, in all this, what accounts for the transformation of unflappable Claire into someone old and scared? To begin with, she'd never quite been able to get past the sheer grisliness of the Jessica Clarke case--she'd been a lead investigator in it--and now it's alive again, the centerpiece of her nightmares. Even more pressingly, she's being stalked: late-night phone calls plus a shivery letter from the pretend Gordon Rooker. Claire needs help, she acknowledges to Thorne. Meanwhile, back at the Met, a task force is being formed to cope with the sudden ratcheting up of gangland hostilities--a development that forces Thorne to confront an old enemy: DCI Nick Tugham, ambitious, sycophantic and, worst of all, his senior. Street mayhem on the one hand, office politics on the other, plus a dismal ongoing family drama: Will Thorne doloroso ever catch a break? Thriller in a minor key. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The fourth entry in the Tom Thorne series once again finds the chip-shouldered London detective inspector and his investigative team tracking down a child predator. In this case, a prisoner who years ago confessed to dousing a schoolgirl with lighter fluid and then setting her afire claims he wasn't the perp. The fact that someone's now up to similarly gruesome tricks on the outside gives the man's story enough credibility to draw Thorne and a retired colleague into the hunt. Because the original crime was designed to spark a mob war, the cold-case investigation soon dovetails with the team's current focus on tensions between old-school British gangsters and upstart Turkish Kurds (not to mention a contract killer who carves Xs into his victims). It's a solid plot, and Thorne fans will enjoy the book. But it fails to deliver much of the intriguing personal interplay that makes the series stand out--save for a moving subplot involving Thorne's Alzheimer's-afflicted father. The detective's abnormally strident tone in the second half also makes one hope Billingham can recapture the magic next time out. --Frank Sennett Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
London detective Tom Thorne makes a welcome return in Billingham's latest thriller (after Lazybones). Simultaneously familiar and edgy, still drinking and caring too much, Thorne is investigating a series of contract killings distinguished by the letter X carved into the victims' naked backs. When he pairs up with ex-Detective Chief Inspector Carol Chamberlain to work a cold case involving the immolation of a young girl, clues from the separate investigations begin to come together. Suddenly, Thorne finds himself enmeshed with London's biggest gangland family, whose activities include racketeering, retribution killings, and human trafficking. When Thorne discovers an X carved on his front door, he fears it may be too late to save himself. Once again, Billingham has crafted a gripping police procedural filled with multidimensional, realistic characters that will keep readers hooked: Thorne's long-suffering sister and their Alzheimer's-plagued dad; Goth-attired pathologist Phil Hendricks; and detective/struggling new father Dave Holland. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/05.]-Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Burning Girl A Novel Chapter One The train was stationary, somewhere between Golders Green and Hampstead, when the woman stepped into the carriage. Just gone seven on a Monday night. The passengers a pretty fair cross-section of Londoners heading home late, or into the West End to make a night of it. Suits and Evening Standards. The office two-piece and a dog-eared thriller. All human life, in replica football kits and Oxfam chic and Ciro Citterio casuals. Heads bouncing against windows and lolling in sleep, or nodding in time to Coldplay or Craig David or DJ Shadow. For no good reason other than it was on the Northern Line, the train lurched forward suddenly, then stopped again a few seconds later. People looked at the feet of those opposite, or read the adverts above their heads. The silence, save for the tinny basslines bleeding from headphones, exaggerated the lack of connection. At one end of the carriage, two black boys sat together. One looked fifteen or sixteen but was probably younger. He wore a red bandanna, an oversized American football jersey and baggy jeans. He was laden with rings and necklaces. Next to him was a much smaller boy, his younger brother perhaps, dressed almost identically. To the man sitting opposite them, the clothes, the jewellery, the attitude seemed ridiculous on a child whose expensive trainers didn't even reach the floor. The man was stocky, in his early forties, and wore a battered brown leather jacket. He looked away when the bigger boy caught him staring, and ran a hand through hair that was greyer on one side than the other. It looked, to Tom Thorne, as if the two boys had blown their pocket money in a shop called 'Mr Tiny Gangsta'. Within a second or two of the woman coming through the door, the atmosphere in the carriage had changed. From buttoned-up to fully locked-down. English, in extremis . . . Thorne looked at her just long enough to take in the headscarf and the thick, dark eyebrows and the baby cradled beneath one arm. Then he looked away. He didn't quite duck behind a newspaper, like many of those around him, but he was ashamed to admit to himself that this was only because he didn't have one. Thorne stared at his shoes, but was aware of the hand that was thrust out as the woman stood over him. He could see the polystyrene cup, the top of it picked at, or perhaps chewed away. He could hear the woman speak softly in a language he didn't understand and didn't need to. She shook the cup in front of his face and Thorne heard nothing rattle. Then it became a routine: the cup held out, the question asked, the plea ignored and on to the next. Thorne looked up as she moved away down the carriage, feeling an ache building in his gut as he stared at the curve of her back beneath a dark cardigan, the stillness of the arm that supported her baby. He turned away as the ache sharpened into a stab of sorrow for her, and for himself. He turned in time to watch the older boy lean across to his brother. Sucking his teeth before he spoke. A hiss, like cats in a bag. 'I really hate them people . . .' Thorne was still depressed twenty minutes later when he walked out of the tube station on to Kentish Town Road. He wasn't feeling much better by the time he kicked the door of his flat shut behind him. But his mood would not stay black for long. From the living room, a voice was suddenly raised, sullen and wounded, above the noise of the television: 'What bloody time d'you call this?' Thorne dropped his bag, took four steps down the hall and turned to see Phil Hendricks stretched out on the sofa. The pathologist was taller, skinnier and, at thirty-three, ten years younger than Thorne. He was wearing black, as always - jeans and a V-neck sweater - with the usual assortment of rings, spikes and studs through most of the available space on and around his face. There were other piercings elsewhere, but Thorne wanted to know as little about those as possible. Hendricks pointed the remote and flicked off the television. 'Dinner will be utterly ruined.' He was normally about as camp as an armoured car, so the joky attempt at being queeny in his flat Mancunian accent made Thorne smile all the more. 'Right,' Thorne said. 'Like you can even boil an egg.' 'Well, it would have been ruined.' 'What are we having, anyway?' Hendricks swung his feet down to the floor and rubbed a hand back and forth across his closely shaved skull. 'Menu's next to the phone.' He waved a hand towards the small table in the corner. 'I'm having the usual, plus an extra mushroom bhaji.' Thorne shrugged off his jacket and carried it back out into the hall. He came back in, bent to turn down the radiator, carried a dirty mug through to the kitchen. He picked up Hendricks' biker boots from in front of the sofa and carried them out into the hall. Then he picked up the phone and called the Bengal Lancer . . . Hendricks had been sleeping on Thorne's sofa-bed since just after Christmas, when the collection of mushrooms growing in his own place had reached monstrous proportions. The builders and dampproofers were supposed to be there for less than a week, but as with all such estimates the reality hadn't quite matched up. Thorne was still unsure why Hendricks hadn't just moved in with his current boyfriend, Brendan - he still spent a couple of nights a week there as it was. Thorne's best guess was that, with a relationship as on and off as theirs, even a temporary move would have been somewhat risky ... The Burning Girl A Novel . Copyright © by Mark Billingham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Burning Girl: A Novel 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.
