Mark Billingham

Some fires never go out... X marks the spot -- and when that spot is a corpse's naked back and the X is carved in blood, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is in no doubt that the dead man is the latest victim of a particularly vicious contract killer. It's morbid and messy -- but it's a mystery with plenty of clues. This is turf warfare between North London gangs. Organized crime boss Billy Ryan is moving into someone else's territory, and that someone...

Killing becomes a twisted team sport in this "smart, fast-paced procedural" from the award-winning author of Sleepyhead (Booklist). It was a vicious, calculated murder. The killer selected his victim at London's Euston station, followed her home on the tube, strangled her to death in front of her child. At the same time, killed in the same way, a second body is discovered at the back of King's Cross station. It is a grisly coincidence that eerily...

Three British couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on Easter Sunday, the last day of their vacation, tragedy strikes: the fourteen-year-old daughter of an American vacationer goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves. When the shocked couples return home to the U.K., they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one...

"Tom Thorne finally has it all. In Nicola Tanner and Phil Hendricks, Thorne has good friends by his side. His love life is newly reformed by a promising relationship and he is happy in the job he has devoted his life to. As he sets off hunting the woman responsible for a series of grisly murders, Thorne has no way of knowing that he will be plunged into a nightmare from which he may never wake. A nightmare that has a name. Thorne's past threatens...

Detective Tom Thorne is forced to re-consider an old case when a grieving father takes one of Thorne's colleagues hostage and demands to know the truth about how his son died in prison from the man who put him away.

"In the summer of 1996, two boys run from a playground into the adjoining woods, but only one comes out. DS Tom Thorne takes on a case that quickly spirals out of control when two people connected with the missing boy are murdered. As London prepares to host the European soccer championships, Thorne fights to keep on top of a baffling investigation while also dealing with the ugly fallout of his broken marriage"-- Provided by publisher.

"Alice Armitage is a police officer. Or she was. Or perhaps she just imagines she was. Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. Though convinced that she doesn't really belong there, she finds companionship with the other patients in the ward despite their challenging and often intimidating issues. So...

Luke Mullen, the missing teenage son of a former police officer, was last seen getting into a car with an older woman. No one knows whether he went willingly or was abducted, whether he's living or dead. Then the videotape arrives…On special assignment, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is in charge of the investigation into Luke's disappearance. But it's the information that Tony Mullen, the boy's father, is not freely sharing that Thorne finds particularly...

To his friends, his foes and even to himself it looks as though Tom Thorne's career is on the skids. On his last case he had seriously over-stepped the mark, and now gardening leave has been suggested and all he has to tend is a window box. So when it appears someone is targeting London's homeless community it seems perfectly natural for Thorne to take a step nearer to the gutter and go undercover amongst them. He blends into the sometimes invisible...

Who'd trust a depraved killer like Stuart Nicklin? Tom Thorne, the DI who put him away, has to. Nicklin has promised to bring closure to the grieving mother of one of his first victims by finally revealing where the body can be found. But there's just one condition: Thorne must accompany him to the burial ground-the remote Bardsey Island, cut off from the mainland of Wales in more ways than one. Nicklin is in cuffs, surrounded by authorities, and...