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The Burning Girl |
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The Burning Girl |
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基本信息·出版社：Sphere
·页码：448 页
·出版日期：2007年11月
·ISBN：0751534897
·条形码：9780751534894
·版本：New Ed
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
内容简介 Jessica Clarke had been set alight twenty years ago. Her attacker, quickly tracked down and eager to confess, was still in jail, his career as a hitman for North London gangs now well behind him. So who is harassing Carol Chamberlain, the arresting officer in that case, and claiming that he is the one who burned the girl? Now retired, Carol turns to DI Tom Thorne for help. He's up to his neck in an investigation into a series of killings, which appears to be the result of a turf war between rival gangs, and he's fed up to the gills with reporting to DCI Tughan, so helping Carol out looks like a good deed in a naughty world. Only the world is about to turn much nastier, so nasty in fact that he finds himself longing for a straightforward psycopath to hunt down. In Mark Billingham's fourth novel, he explores the effects of violence and greed on the lives of those who exploit their fellow beings in a novel of exceptional power.
作者简介 Mark Billingham is a stand-up comedian, appearing regularly at the Comedy Store. He has been awarded the 2003 Sherlock Award as the creator of the Best Detective created by a British writer and the inaugural Theakston's Old Peculier Award for the best crime novel of the year for LAZYBONES.
媒体推荐 'A disturbing and ruthlessly compelling novel.' Sunday Express 'Murder and mystery do not come better than this.' What's On in London 'Brisk, racy read.' The Times 'Assured and shocking thriller.' The Guardian 'A cunning variation on the serial-murder theme.' Sunday Telegraph 'Scary, pell-mell, cliff-hanging thriller.' Literary Review
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review A contract killer is carving his way through North London's criminal underworld, leaving a bloody X on his victims' backs and taking Billy Ryan's gang down one thug at a time. Detective Inspector Tom Thorne and his team know there's a turf war going on, but who's attempting to take over Ryan's racket isn't quite clear. When DCI Carol Chamberlin comes out of retirement to work on the cold case squad and asks Thorne for help solving an old murder, the past and present catch up in what looks like a continuation of a twenty-year-old gang war. And when someone carves an X in Thorne's door, a fuse is lit that stretches from the eponymous burning girl of the title--Chamberlin's old case--to the gang war that's lighting up the London sky. It's a clunky plot that relies on telling more than showing, slowing down the pace and makeing it difficult for the reader to care about any of the principals involved--either the victims or those who seek justic for them. Billingham has written better thrillers (
Lazybones,
Scaredy Cat), but this one doesn't live up to their promises.
--Jane Adams --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers Weekly The engrossing fourth novel by British TV writer Billingham to feature London police detective Tom Thorne (after 2004's
Lazybones) has a solid, traditional structure and plot, and a whiff of noir sensibility. Thorne is the solid reliable cop whom witnesses trust and colleagues appreciate. Of late, he's taken in his temporarily homeless pal, pathologist Phil Hendricks, and Billingham has fun with this odd couple (Phil is gay, messy and heavily pierced; Thorne is a Lucinda Williams–loving neatnik). Thorne's also willing to help out another friend—prickly, middle-aged ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain—who's uncovered new evidence about a case from the 1980s in which a schoolgirl was set on fire. Moral complexity clouds the picture: the man wrongly imprisoned for that heinous act is a career criminal; empathetic Thorne drifts into an affair with a key witness. A second case, equally complex, involves the murder of a Turkish video store owner, which proves to be just one of an alarming series of killings whose pattern Thorne must determine. Billingham delivers an edgy, ambitious novel with an excellent cast—just as BBC America's
Mystery Monday offers a character-driven alternative to the current spate of forensics-heavy American TV police procedurals—and Morrow's betting on this one, with its hardcover-at-a-paperback-price, to break him out big.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Booklist The fourth entry in the Tom Thorne series once again finds the chip-shouldered London detective inspector and his investigative team tracking down a child predator. In this case, a prisoner who years ago confessed to dousing a schoolgirl with lighter fluid and then setting her afire claims he wasn't the perp. The fact that someone's now up to similarly gruesome tricks on the outside gives the man's story enough credibility to draw Thorne and a retired colleague into the hunt. Because the original crime was designed to spark a mob war, the cold-case investigation soon dovetails with the team's current focus on tensions between old-school British gangsters and upstart Turkish Kurds (not to mention a contract killer who carves Xs into his victims). It's a solid plot, and Thorne fans will enjoy the book. But it fails to deliver much of the intriguing personal interplay that makes the series stand out--save for a moving subplot involving Thorne's Alzheimer's-afflicted father. The detective's abnormally strident tone in the second half also makes one hope Billingham can recapture the magic next time out.
Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Review 'A disturbing and ruthlessly compelling novel.' Sunday Express 'Murder and mystery do not come better than this.' What's On in London 'Brisk, racy read.' The Times 'Assured and shocking thriller.' The Guardian 'A cunning variation on the serial-murder theme.' Sunday Telegraph 'Scary, pell-mell, cliff-hanging thriller.' Literary Review
