From the Dead

November 11, 2013
At the outset of Billingham’s engrossing ninth novel featuring Det. Insp. Tom Thorne (after 2011’s Bloodline), an unnamed man stages his own death, allowing him to escape from England; his former wife is convicted of conspiring to murder him. Ten years later, that wife, Donna Langford, is out of prison, insisting on her innocence, a claim bolstered by her having recently received a photo showing her husband, Alan Langford, in a place that looks like Spain, apparently “back from the dead.” Donna engages Anna Carpenter, an inexperienced and ill-equipped PI, who turns for help to Thorne, though the London cop happens to be consumed by the trial of a man accused of murdering an 18-year-old girl whose body was never found. While the incessant banter between Thorne and his colleagues can be distracting and the murder trial gets somewhat lost in the shuffle, a chillingly clever criminal boosts this intelligent procedural. Agent: Anna Steadman, Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency (U.K.).

January 1, 2014
DI Tom Thorne (The Dying Hours, 2013, etc.) faces "the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse." Paul Monahan certainly handcuffed someone to the steering wheel inside Alan Langford's car before he doused it in petrol and set it ablaze. Based on the evidence found in the photos Langford's wife, Donna, received shortly before her release from Wakefield Prison after serving 10 years for conspiring to kill him, though, it wasn't Langford. Donna doesn't much care whether her abusive husband is dead or alive, but she's desperate for news about her daughter Ellie, 18, who disappeared last year while Donna was still enjoying her majesty's hospitality, and she fears that Alan spirited her away. She begs Anna Carpenter, a low-rent inquiry agent who usually serves as the bait in honey traps, to help her, and Anna begs Thorne to help her help. For reasons that have nothing to do with his own personal preferences, Thorne agrees to take Anna along with him to Wakefield, where Paul Monahan, who's still serving his own time, insists that he doesn't know anything about a substitute corpse. His story convinces neither Thorne nor, evidently, whoever gets a fellow inmate to stab him to death that night. Clearly, someone doesn't want the case reopened. Thorne, traumatized by the not-guilty verdict that vindicated judo instructor Adam Chambers of murder charges after his student Andrea Keane vanished, is haunted by the two missing 18-year-olds, and soon enough, readers will be too. Not the best of Thorne's nine appearances, but a solid, rewarding piece of work from beginning to end, with a particularly neat twist that arrives just after readers finally let down their guards.

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December 1, 2013
London gangster Alan Langford's charred remains were found handcuffed to the steering wheel of a burned-out Jaguar, and copper Tom Thorne (The Dying Hours, 2013) quickly extracted a confession from Langford's wife, Donna, who admitted to hiring one of Langford's associates to kill him. A decade later, after being released from prison, she receives a photo of Langford in the mail, and he appears to be alive and well in some sunny seaside resort. At the same time, her 18-year-old daughter, who was placed with a foster family when Donna was jailed, has disappeared. Thorne is assigned to investigate, and people begin to die. Thorne and his creator are wildly successful in England, but this one has some problems. Plot convolutions seem endless and overcooked, and the attention to Thorne's angst and his fraying relationship with his significant other causes the narrative to lag. But the pace accelerates when Thorne tracks Langford to Spain's wealthy, dodgy Costa del Sol, and a surprising, if not fully satisfying, denouement plays out.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)