The Burning Girl by
Mark Billingham
pbk out May 05
(Time Warner)
at £6.99
Mark Billingham is also a stand-up comic, but there's nothing humorous about
this story, the latest in the Tom Thorne series. We are deeply into gangland warfare
here, with an ethnic twist, as the Turkish mob horns in on the game. Tom Thorne's
private life isn't a barrel of laughs either, as his father descends into senility. This is
not really classic noir, but it's as dark as you can get without a serial killer.
Thorne's troubles start when he agrees to help out an old friend, ex-DCI Carol
Chamberlain, who is haunted by the murder of a schoolgirl called Jessica Clarke some
years back. She was doused in lighter fuel and set alight. She survived, horribly
scarred, only to take her own life on her sixteenth birthday. Chamberlain still has
nightmares about the girl, and now her attacker, Gordon Rooker, is due to be released.
And someone else is claiming to have doen the deed. She enlists Thorne's help in
questioning Rooker, but he is entangled with an apparent series of tit-for-tat murders
involving the Turks and gangland boss Billy Ryan. Curiously enough, Billy's ex-wife
is the girl who should have been set light to all those years ago, as the attack on
Jessica was a case of mistaken identity.
The previous Thorne stories, Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat and Lazybones, all
garnered excellent reviews. Hailed as edge-of-the-seat stuff, and taut and gripping,
they built Billingham's reputation as a stylish writer of police procedural. The
Burning Girl certainly continues the feeling for the complexities of police work, at the
expense sometimes of being dense and, well, plodding. The excursions into Thorne's
private life don't always illuminate the storyline, and I found myself yearning for the
tautness and spare qualities of the text of such greats as Elmore Leonard. But
Billingham has an essentially British style of writing that revels in the dour and the
tough. The themes wind around each other like the serpentine and scaly bodies of a
nest of snakes. And Thorne is left to disentangle the mess, and find a private justice
of his own that he hopes will not corrode his soul.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
The Burning Girl by
Mark Billingham
