Time of Death

April 13, 2015
At the outset of Billingham’s slow-burning 13th Tom Thorne novel (after 2014’s The Bones Beneath), the detective inspector’s girlfriend, Det. Sgt. Helen Weeks, persuades him to abandon their original holiday plans and head instead to Polesford, the small Warwickshire village where she grew up, after she recognizes a childhood friend, Linda Bates, on the news as the wife of a man accused of abducting two teenage girls. Even though she hasn’t seen Linda for decades, Helen feels a strange pull to help her old friend, and Thorne always relishes a new case. It’s been three weeks since Jessica Toms disappeared and two days since Poppy Johnston vanished—both appear to have accepted rides from Linda’s husband. Despite the husband’s claims of innocence, evidence mounts against him, including traces of DNA that place Jessica in his car. Thorne takes a backseat role as he assists Helen in what becomes a deeply personal investigation that builds to a surprising and satisfying climax. Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency (U.K.).

April 1, 2015
DI Tom Thorne and his lover, DS Helen Weeks, return to Helen's hated hometown in Warwickshire to confront some ugly accusations and some even uglier secrets. Now that he's finally found the time to take Helen away from London to the Cotswolds for Valentine's weekend, Thorne (The Bones Beneath, 2014, etc.) is distraught to see a broadcast on the telly that has Helen packing her bags again when they've only just arrived. But Helen is determined to leave with or without him for Polesford, a place she has little reason to love, once she recognizes her classmate Linda Jackson as the wife of Stephen Bates, who's accused of kidnapping two 15-year-old girls. DI Tim Cornish listens patiently as Thorne notes the circumstantial nature of the evidence against Steve, but he's confident that they've got the right man banged up. So is the rest of the town, which quickly turns on Linda for standing by her man and Helen for poking her nose into their business. When searchers find the corpse of Jessica Toms, the forensic discoveries seem to tighten the noose around Steve's neck even further. But Thorne grows more and more skeptical, and as the evidence against Steve continues to pile up, he enlists his old friend, pathologist Phil Hendricks, to poke holes in the case against Steve so that he can identify the killer, who's devised an unusually devious way to fudge the forensics, before he can kill his second victim, Poppy Johnston, whose fate Billingham follows one heartbeat at a time. Despite hints to the contrary, the crime and the investigation are routine, and the killer is a cipher. What lingers in the memory is the group portrait of the Polesford locals brutally closing ranks against a man they're certain deserves to die.