Sleepyhead - Softcover

Billingham, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061032212 ISBN 13: 9780061032219

Publisher: Avon Books, 2003

Synopsis

When a victim of a deliberately induced stroke is discovered, completely aware of her surroundings but unable to move or communicate, Detective Tom Thorne is horrified to learn that the attacker's intention is to leave his victims hanging between life and death. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

The art of inducing fear in a reader via the printed page is a speciality of only a few skilled craftsmen. Mark Billingham is such an author, and Sleepy Head is such a book. The blurb on the jacket warns that we are in for a disturbing experience and that is precisely what we get: "He doesn't want you alive. He doesn't want you dead. He wants you somewhere in between".

The killer who Billingham's protagonist Tom Thorne is up against is a particularly creepy specimen: he has savagely killed three victims but his fourth, although alive, is perhaps not so fortunate. She has undergone a deliberately induced stroke and although all her senses are intact, she is totally unable to move or communicate. This hideous condition, called Locked-in Syndrome is, however, quite possibly the killer's first miscalculation ... or is it? Soon the dogged Thorne (given to distrusting his own abilities) is playing a cat-and-mouse game with a psychopathic killer. And the brilliant and sadistic killer is just as interested in leading Thorne a merry dance as he is in fulfilling his degraded obsessions.

All characterisations here are spot-on, even the killer (although one wonders just how many more hyper-intelligent psychopaths readers will be prepared to take) while the British setting is handled with intelligence, the horrific set pieces with real élan:

His head moved up, through the hole and into bright white light. He blinked quickly to adjust and opened his eyes. Thorne's last thought, before his body turned ice cold and began to shake quietly, was that he'd been right to be afraid...

--Barry Forshaw

Review:

A terrifically stylish debut novel Independent on Sunday Extremely capable and unsettling Literary Review A cunning variation on the serial-murder theme Sunday Telegraph Mark Billingham is one of my favourite new authors. Highly recommended -- Harlan Coben

About this edition

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0061032212
• ISBN 13: 9780061032219
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback