The Burning Girl
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3.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The fourth book in the Tom Thorne series, from bestselling author Mark Billingham.
A MAN WHO KILLS FOR MONEY
X marks the spot - and when that spot is a corpse's naked back and the X is carved in blood, DI Tom Thorne is in no doubt that the dead man is the latest victim of a particularly vicious killer.
A BRUTAL VENDETTA
This is brutal turf warfare between north London gangs. Organised crime boss Billy Ryan is moving into someone else's patch, and that someone is not best pleased.
A COP WHO IS PLAYING WITH FIRE
And when an X is carved on DI Tom Thorne's front door, he knows the smouldering embers of this case are about to erupt into flames...
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Read what everyone's saying about the heart-racing Tom Thorne series:
'Literary superstar' Mail on Sunday
'Ingenious' Guardian
'Ground-breaking' Sunday Times
'Mark Billingham gets better and better' Michael Connelly
'A cracking read . . . I couldn't put it down!' Shari Lapena
'A damn fine storyteller' Karin Slaughter
'Twisted and twisty' Linwood Barclay
'One of the most consistently entertaining, insightful crime writers working today' Gillian Flynn
'The next superstar detective is already with us. Don't miss him' Lee Child
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The engrossing fourth novel by British TV writer Billingham to feature London police detective Tom Thorne (after 2004's Lazybones) has a solid, traditional structure and plot, and a whiff of noir sensibility. Thorne is the solid reliable cop whom witnesses trust and colleagues appreciate. Of late, he's taken in his temporarily homeless pal, pathologist Phil Hendricks, and Billingham has fun with this odd couple (Phil is gay, messy and heavily pierced; Thorne is a Lucinda Williams loving neatnik). Thorne's also willing to help out another friend prickly, middle-aged ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain who's uncovered new evidence about a case from the 1980s in which a schoolgirl was set on fire. Moral complexity clouds the picture: the man wrongly imprisoned for that heinous act is a career criminal; empathetic Thorne drifts into an affair with a key witness. A second case, equally complex, involves the murder of a Turkish video store owner, which proves to be just one of an alarming series of killings whose pattern Thorne must determine. Billingham delivers an edgy, ambitious novel with an excellent cast just as BBC America's Mystery Monday offers a character-driven alternative to the current spate of forensics-heavy American TV police procedurals and Morrow's betting on this one, with its hardcover-at-a-paperback-price, to break him out big.
