But Tom can’t help himself and, as he passes the time scrutinising the villagers, wheedling out their secrets, his years of experience tells him that something is wrong.

Time of Death is the 13th mystery in Mark Billingham’s series featuring Detectives Tom Thorne and Helen Weeks. In every novel since Tom and Helen got together, I have frequently wanted to give them both a shaking and a severe talking to. Based on Time of Death, I would certainly read the first book in Billingham's series and consider whether to keep going with the series. Most of it is fairly low-level, simply a sign of a lack of imagination and facility in the author's use of vocabulary, but some of it is pretty strong. The books here are primarily of the Historical Fiction or Science Fiction bent with some Thrillers and Crime thrown in - but there are happy exceptions.

Following directions, staying out of trouble and closing his bothersome mouth are just too hard for him.

Time of Death sees Thorne and Weeks setting off on a romantic break to the Cotswolds only for Weeks to see the partner of her best friend from school being arrested for the abduction of two teenage girls. This is a question that bothers us as well and, as the truth is revealed, we are rewarded with a novel that isn’t just an exciting crime puzzle but also a complex and sensitive investigation into some very dark places. It takes a true story-teller to manage a disparate group of characters and maintain some of the most authentic dialogue I’ve read in quite some time. I am slowly working my way through the excellent Tom Thorne series of books written by Mark Billingham, I have yet to read a bad book in this series, they are certainly some of the best the crime genre has to offer.But I don't want to spend all my time reading mysteries so I am always reluctant to try new ones and I am especially reluctant to jump into the middle of a mystery series, but in this case I had an opportunity to get a free-be from Netgalley so I took a chance based on the description of the story. I like a few mystery series and am a very loyal reader of each book in the series as they come out -- Louise Penny, Michael Connelly, Elizabeth George, Sara Paretsky, Camilla Lackberg to name a few. It’s always good news to discover a new author and I will be following this series for sure as it continues.

Helen spends a lot of time with Linda helping to support her as the suspect’s wife and I quite liked this angle, which is not one that we often come across in this type of read. When it's splashed all over the press that family man Stephen Bates has been arrested, Helen and her partner Tom Thorne head to the flooded town to support Bates' wife - an old school friend of Helen's - who is living under siege with two teenage children and convinced of her husband's innocence. I. Tom Thorne has twice won him the Crime Novel Of The Year Award as well as the Sherlock Award for Best British Detective and been nominated for seven CWA Daggers. Good story line, probably helped in my head by the familiarity of most of the locations and experience of what they are like when they flood. This entry was posted in Crime, Review and tagged Crime on October 14, 2015 by Kate (For Winter Nights).To sum up, a standard serial killer police procedural, quite well-written, slow in places, with lots of swearing, a bit of angst, the obligatory child abuse angle, and some gratuitous and silly police brutality. Mark Billingham's book Time of Death has a place in the shortlist of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for 2016. In Time of Death Mark Billingham has provided the reader with another well written, complex narrative that speaks to issues that we can all empathise with. Now the unspoken rule with crime books is that the author can't just pluck the guilty party out of thin air at the end of the book, the reader must have met the guilty party during the narrative, and using this logic I figured I sussed it all out by the mid-way point.