Lazybones (Tom Thorne Novels) - Softcover

Mark Billingham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0751534277 ISBN 13: 9780751534276

Publisher: Sphere, 2004

Synopsis

It is only ten days since Douglas Remfrey's release from prison, having served seven years of a twelve-year sentence for rape, and now he is dead: naked on a bare mattress in the grubbiest of North London hotel rooms, his head hooded and his hands tied tight with a brown leather belt. Someone knew he was coming out. Someone wanted to mete out some new punishment of his own. And when a second sex offender is discovered dead, different hotel, same modus operandi, Thorne knows he has a vicious, calculating vigilante on his hands. Thorne works best when his passions are up, when his anger flares him into action. Here though, his sympathy for the dead is zero. It is only as the investigation continues that he finally discovers a victim worth fighting for, a victim whose identity becomes crucial in cracking this most twisted of cases........

About this title

Product Description:

Someone - a woman or somebody pretending to be a woman - is writing to convicted rapists in prison, befriending them and then brutally killing them when they are released.

DI Tom Thorne must discover the link between these killings and a murder/suicide that took place twenty-five years before ; a tragedy to which the only witnesses were two small children, now adults and nowhere to be found...

How can you escape a past that will do a lot more than just catch up with you?

And how can Thorne catch a killer, when he doesn't really care about the victims?

Review:

Lazybones confirms our sense of Mark Billingham as a thriller writer determined to put ever more inventive spins on the police procedural and the serial killer novel. His police officers--hard-working Country fan Thorne, pierced gay pathologist Hendricks and the rest--find themselves on a case that raises complicated issues for them; they have continually to remind themselves that dead rapists have as much right not to be raped and murdered as anyone else.

Billingham's tricksiness--he tells us just enough of what the killer is thinking to keep us intrigued and confused--goes along with a real sense of London's back streets: the shabbiness of small hotels and the lonely hours of the early morning. The case involves not only pursuing present cases, but chasing up back-story; among all its other merits, this is an intelligent and humane discussion of changing attitudes to rape and its investigation. There was a time, after all, not so long ago, when police regularly failed to take rape seriously enough to get convictions. This is not just an ingenious thriller--Billingham makes us care what happens to Thorne, who is in far more jeopardy than he ever begins to know. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: Sphere
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0751534277
• ISBN 13: 9780751534276
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448