Review: GOOD AS DEAD

GOOD AS DEAD by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown, 2011)

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

The Hostage. Police officer Helen Weeks walks into her local newsagent's on her way to work. Little does she know that this simple daily ritual will change her life forever. It's the last place she expects to be met with violence, but as she waits innocently at the till, she comes face to face with a gunman.

The Demand. The crazed hostage-taker is desperate to know what really happened to his beloved son, who died a year before in youth custody. By holding a police officer at gunpoint, he will force the one man who knows more about the case than any other to re-investigate his son's death. That man is DI Tom Thorne.

The Twist. While Helen fights to stay alive and the body-count rises,Thorne must race against time if he is to bring a killer to justice and save a young mother's life. 

Few if any are better than Billingham in modern English crime writing when it comes to maintaining a great long-running series at a top-shelf level. His first Tom Thorne novel, SLEEPYHEAD remains one of the best crime fiction debuts of the past twenty years, and in this, then tenth novel to feature DI Thorne, Billingham keeps the storyline revs high while delivering on character and more as well.

In GOOD AS DEAD, Billingham's country music loving London detective is in a race-against-time to save fellow police officer Helen Weeks (who starred in Billingham's first standalone, IN THE DARK), who's being held by a dairy owner on the edge, someone searching for justice and who feels only desperate measures may get needed attention. Can Thorne save the day in the present while digging into the past to solve a case that may or may not be a case at all?

This tenth Thorne novel has an extremely exciting plotline (more of a 'ticking clock' type piece, with strong thriller aspects, than Billingham usually utilises in his excellent procedural series), married with compelling characters and continuing threads that run throughout the series. It feels like Billingham is stretching his legs a little, and doing it in fine fashion.

He's created a great, gripping read that will leave long-time readers wondering what is next for DI Tom Thorne, while also getting you thinking about a variety of law and justice issues, and salting in some nuggets of social commentary among all the page-turning thrills.

A very, very good read in a top-shelf series. Perhaps not the best in Billingham's oeuvre, but that's only because he has set the bar so bloody high with several of his books. A recommended read.

This is an expanded version of a mini online review I wrote of this book after reading it in late 2011. 

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer from New Zealand, now living in London. In recent years he’s interviewed hundreds of crime writers and talked about the genre on national radio, top podcasts, and onstage at books festivals on three continents. He has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and the McIlvanney Prize, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. You can heckle him on Twitter.