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To friends and enemies alike, it looks as though Tom Thorne's career is on the skids. Depressed by the recent loss of his father and berated for seriously overstepping the mark on his last case, he's been encouraged to take 'gardening' leave. For an ambitious detective - especially one without as much as a window box - it's a fairly dire situation.
But not as dire as the situation for London's homeless. Three men, sleeping rough on the streets paved with anything but gold, have been murdered - each victim kicked to death and found with a 20 pound note pinned to his chest. Were these men just random alcoholics, junkies and jetsam? Or where they targeted for a reason?
Thorne is perfectly placed to find out, and is seconded to the streets. Not as a policemen on the beat but as one of life's rejects. It fits: he looks the part - and feels it as well. In a harsh and harrowing netherworld, with its own rules and moral code, Thorne discovers the horrifying link between the homeless victims and the perpetrators of a fifteen-year-old atrocity. Those that know are saying nothing. But the word on the streets is that the killer is a cop. A policeman, it seems, was sniffing around long before Thorne came on the scene.
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Review by: goldfishstar (Natalie)
Dated: 26th of July, 2005
Tom Thorne starts to come into his own in this book...
As do the rest of the characters in the series - with more explainations about who they are and where they all fit in the grand scheme of thing, Lifeless felt like a much more cohesive book to me in the grand scheme of things...
The story line, as with The Burning Girl, was well thought out, had the twists and just enough gruesome details to keep you intrigued, and with the fleshing out of the characters in many ways it become the more interesting of the two books.
It was well researched, and the homeless characters in the books, the sights and smells of the day to day world they live in, all seemed to to come alive in my mind. This may be because I've been to those parts of London and walked those streets and seen those people in the doorways, but I think that Mark Billingham captured them with enough compassion to bring them to life.
A much more readable read ~thumbs up~
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