Mark Billingham
Little, Brown, £20
Mark Billingham’s new stand-alone novel (ie, one that doesn’t feature his longstanding detective, Tom Thorne) is a whodunit set on a psychiatric ward. The book carries out its whodunit duties—a shifting series of credible suspects, plenty of neat twists, a conclusion that’s both plausible and unguessable—with undeniable skill. Nonetheless its main interest, for Billingham and the reader alike, perhaps lies elsewhere: in the brilliantly realised setting and particularly in the richly nuanced character of its narrator.
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