Book review: The Bones Beneath

First order of business after clearing the pile of Song of Ice and Fire books was to catch up with Mark Billingham, and a look on Amazon shows that the 12th Thorne novel hasn't been popular with everybody. I guess people's complaints that there's not much action are technically accurate, but that's not how it felt to me reading it. The Bones Beneath goes back to Stuart Nicklin, the killer from one of the earliest Tom Thorne novels, a psychopath with a particular talent for getting others to do his dirty work for him. He reveals that one of his first-ever murders took place on a remote Welsh island when he was a teenager, and he's willing to take the police to the body. He obviously has an ulterior motive but Thorne knows Nicklin will be able to attract bad publicity to the police if they refuse to find the bones for the sake of the victim's family, so they're stuck with taking the prisoner on an extended trip.

Cutaway chapters reveal early on that Nicklin's accomplices have a captive somewhere, and it's true that I did figure out early on who that would turn out to be, but I still thought this was an effective thriller: The fact that so little happens until near the very end means there's a horrible tension as we wait to find out what the real plan is. Definitely something of a format-breaker which obviously hasn't been a hit with everyone, but for me The Bones Beneath worked.