Lazy Bones
by Mark Billingham
Morrow, 384 pages, hardback, 2003
I read and was much impressed by Mark Billingham's previous Inspector Tom Thorne thriller, Scaredy Cat, although I had reservations about the clumsiness of the writing. This time around, that clumsiness has disappeared, as if by magic – or by editor – and we're left with a marvellously slick piece of police-procedural noir. My only reservations concern the plotting.
Thorne and his crew at Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Group perhaps shouldn't have been called in for something so banal as the torture murder of recently released rapist Douglas Remfry, but it's lucky they are because the killing proves to be the first in a series. Someone is cultivating pen-friendships with convicted rapists and then, on their release, luring them with pornographic photos and promises of S&M sex to their painful dooms. As with other serial cases, the likelihood is that the source of the murderer's rage lies somewhere in history, but at first the SCG doesn't know where in history to look. A search of past murders reveals a couple of unsolved cases that are tantalizingly similar, but the similarities aren't quite strong enough and anyway there's no obvious connection.
But then at last one of the employees of the recently formed Area Major Review Unit – which brings elderly police officers out of retirement to analyze cold cases – starts probing the long-ago murder of an accused but acquitted rapist, and this leads her to a ghastly 25-year-old murder-suicide that may hold the key to Tom Thorne's latest problem.
Meanwhile the body count continues to rise, and through it all the flinty hearted Thorne is trying to cope with the blossoming of the first romance to come his way in years ...
The mortar in Billingham's thrillers is the joyous facility with which he creates vivid, interesting, complex secondary characters. Outstanding in Lazy Bones are Phil Hendricks (from previous cases), the gay, punk forensics expert who just happens to be the seemingly ultra-conservative copper Tom Thorne's best friend; and especially Carol Chamberlain, the police retiree who looks like someone's not-necessarily-very-nice, overweight granny but who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a mind like a laser to her duties at the Area Major Review Unit. Even if the main plot itself were not so powerfully gripping, we'd be kept reading compulsively by the urge to follow the fates of these and the other characters.
In the case of Lazy Bones, it's good that this is so, because the plotting makes it a bit thunderingly obvious to us, from about two-thirds of the way in, who it is who's committing the murders. Since Thorne has almost the full gamut of the same evidence in front of him as we do, it's somewhat implausible that his masterful detective mind doesn't at least share the same suspicions. In fact, the book otherwise has such a strength to it that the pages keep relentlessly turning anyway, but it means that one finishes Lazy Bones with a sense of slight disappointment that the denouement's anticipated reversal of expectations never happened.
If you've not encountered Tom Thorne yet, you most certainly should. He's a worthy counterpart to Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus. And that's high praise.
—Crescent Blues