Book review: The Dying Hours

This year's Mark Billingham thriller is a return to the Tom Thorne series, and The Dying Hours comes from a challenge from a couple of uniformed cops to Billingham: Namely to see how Thorne would handle being back in uniform. The detective's been threatened with demotion enough times for it to seem plausible that he'd piss his superiors off one time too many, so he's now back on patrol in South London.

Aside from the embarrassment this also means the experienced policeman's hunches are no longer taken as seriously, and when an unusual number of elderly people start committing suicide, his bosses don't believe that there's something else behind it. So Thorne has to call in some favours and try to fit in his own private investigation around night shifts in Lewisham. The unpredictable structure is one of the fun parts of Billingham's writing, and here the revelation of what's going on comes a lot earlier than might be expected, leaving time for a lot more twists and complications.