Review by New York Times Review
HONOR-BASED VIOLENCE - which covers everything from beatings and kidnapping to mutilation and murder - is a scourge in Britain, where the Crown Prosecution Service estimates that the 12 or so honor killings reported each year are only a fraction of the true number committed in Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. In LOVE LIKE BLOOD (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Mark Billingham puts human faces on one such case, telling the story of Amaya and Kamai, two Bangladeshi teenagers who run away together to avoid arranged marriages. They make it as far as the London Underground, and the rest is pure savagery. "There isn't an ounce of anything like nobility in what these people do," Detective Inspector Nicola Tanner hotly informs her colleague Tom Thorne. "It's murder, pure and simple, pretending to be something else." Although "dishonored" male relatives are prime suspects in most cases of punitive violence, squeamish families often prefer to shop the job to a middleman with access to professional hit men - thugs like Muldoon and Riaz, who collaborate efficiently but whose cultural clashes can be morbidly funny. (Riaz enjoys Bollywood movies, while Muldoon is amused by these musical fantasies about forlorn lovers. "In a film or whatever, you get to sing about it," he observes, "but in real life you get the likes of us turning up.") Billingham allows his plot to wander down some pretty dark alleys. A friend of Amaya's is gang-raped, considered appropriate retribution for talking to the police. And it's disconcerting to learn that in Pakistan some honor killings can be forgiven by the victim's family, with no punishment for the murderers. But Billingham saves his real animus for the Metropolitan Police's Honor Crimes Unit, which receives 3,000 incident reports a year but doesn't have a website - or even a sign on the door. "There's a Royal Protection Unit and a Marine Unit and a big, hairy Dog Support Unit," Thorne notes, but nothing about an Honor Crimes Unit. "It's as if it doesn't officially exist." Which is what the victims assumed all along. DETECTIVE MANON BRADSHAW was endearingly klutzy in last year's "Missing, Presumed," by Susie Steiner. Since she's five months pregnant in persons unknown (Random House, $27), she's even more ungainly, but still endearing, in a novel that's nominally a mystery but is actually a smart and funny rumination on motherhood. Manon has returned to Cambridgeshire with her adopted 12-year-old son, Fly, to protect him from the indignities of growing up black in London. The irony is that the boy becomes a major suspect in the murder of a London banker who turns out to be the ex-husband of Manon's sister, Ellie, and the father of her 3-year-old son. Although the plot - involving the sleaze merchants of an international prostitution ring - is a mess, the racial theme cuts deep enough to hurt, and the characters are distinctive. Secondary players like Detective Sergeant Davy Walker, who lives to help others, and Birdie Fielding, a prize specimen of the Beatles' lonely people, are sweethearts. But since Steiner seems to judge all her characters on the strength of their mothering instincts, the Latvian gangsters don't get any love. MARGARET maron is one of those authors whose devoted fans would follow them anywhere. Now that she has retired her wonderful Deborah Knott series set in North Carolina, readers must head for New York City, the setting of TAKE OUT (Grand Central, $27), the final mystery in another series, which features Sigrid Harald. Lieutenant Harald's policing may seem old-fashioned, but that's because the novel's action takes place in the 1990s. When two homeless men are found dead on a bench, the detective learns they were poisoned by some takeout food. But this part of Greenwich Village is very neighborly and the locals, who include the widow of a mafia don and a former opera star, were always bringing them home-cooked meals. Which one was meant to die? And who delivered the lethal lasagna? Sigrid has a coolly analytic mind; it's sad to think we're watching her puzzle out her last case. aside from mounting surveillance with a nanny cam, will having an 8-month-old bébe cramp Aimée Leduc's ineffable style? The modish heroine of MURDER IN SAINT-GERMAIN (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other delicious Parisian mysteries by Cara Black must juggle motherhood with finding a nasty blackmailer, overseeing computer security at the École des Beaux-Arts and hunting down a Serbian warlord. This is Black's 17th Leduc novel, each set in a different neighborhood, and the formula still charms. Although the business of the warlord is a lot more interesting than Aimée's bread-and-butter cyber security jobs, finding a babysitter in July and August, when "toute Paris had disappeared," is even more challenging. The criminal elements of the story aren't taxing, but the abiding pleasure of this series is the chance to ride with a cabdriver who wants to discuss Sartre or just tearing around Paris on Aimée's pink Vespa, making stops at the Jardín du Luxembourg and the île Saint-Louis, where Aimée has an apartment. Lucky girl. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Billingham brings Detective Inspector Tom Thorne back (after Time of Death, 2015) for the fourteenth time in a team-up with DI Nicola Tanner from last year's stand-alone, Die of Shame. Tanner is on compassionate leave after the brutal murder of her partner, Susan. She fears the death sentence was actually meant for her because of her involvement in the Honour Crimes Unit. Determined to continue her investigations unofficially, she enlists Thorne's assistance. He finds his humanity sorely tested by the total lack of honour involved. Billingham's skillful plotting is everywhere in evidence here, and Thorne remains a compelling character, comparable to Connolly's Bosch and Rankin's Rebus.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Billingham's entertaining 14th Tom Thorne novel (after 2015's Time of Death) teams the formerly rule-bending London detective inspector, who's fighting middle age and an expanding waistline, with Det. Insp. Nicola Tanner, introduced in 2016's standalone, Die of Shame. When Tanner's life partner, Susan Best, is murdered outside the couple's home after a shopping trip, the by-the-book Tanner believes that she, not Susan, was the intended victim, retaliation for her investigation of a series of honor killings in London's Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities. Skeptical at first, Thorne agrees to help Tanner when a young Bangladeshi couple disappears, and Thorne suspects that the honor killings may be linked to a cold case from his past. Readers may wish for more tension from the contrasting styles of the two well-drawn leads, or that the main plot could offer more surprises, but one perfectly executed twist at the end will leave them eagerly awaiting the next in this series. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
London DI Tom Thorne (Time of Death) returns for another absorbing installment in Billingham's gripping police procedural series. Fellow officer Nicola Tanner (Die of Shame) returns, too, as she needs Thorne's contrarian intelligence to help solve a crime. Tanner is on compassionate leave: her partner was brutally murdered in their home, but Tanner believes that she was the actual target. She had recently been investigating links between two contract killers and possible honor killings in the local Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities, and is convinced that she was supposed to be the next victim. Her superior officers are skeptical, so she and Thorne pursue their own inquiries. Tensions are high, and when two young people go missing in what looks suspiciously like another honor killing, the stakes are raised substantially. Billingham brings the book to its conclusion with a stunning, surprising twist. Verdict Superior writing, credible dialog, and creative plotting drive this deftly crafted crime novel. If you haven't encountered DI Tom Thorne yet, this would be an ideal introduction. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/17; library -marketing.]-Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
DI Tom Thorne steps on more toes than usual to help out Nicola Tanner, a detective who's supposed to stay even further away from the case at hand than he is.Since Susan Best was nothing more than an inoffensive grade school teacher, Tanner is convinced the two men who squirted bleach into her eyes and stabbed her to death mistook her for Tanner herself, who was the dead woman's flat mate and lover. DCI Russell Brigstocke quite properly refuses to let Tanner work the case, so Tanner asks Thorne to take time out from his million other jobs (Time of Death, 2015, etc.) to look into the matter most likely to have made her new enemies: her work with the Honour Crimes Unit, which investigates the murders of young women whose Westernized behavior might have brought shame to their families. The HCU has focused lately on cold cases, but a hot one obligingly turns up: the murder of Amaya Shah, a Barnet College student found with her missing boyfriend's semen inside her. The activist Asian-English members of the Anti Hate Crime Alliance, Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus alike, bay for the blood of Kamal Azim, but the revelation that the missing boyfriend is actually gay persuades Thorne that the guilt lies elsewhereperhaps within the ranks of the AHCA itself. To a case that cries out for tact, delicacy, and cross-cultural sensitivity, Thorne brings bulldog tenacity, a gift for reading people, and a determination to devote his every waking moment to its solution, especially after a second attack leaves Tanner's flat in flames. Most readers won't be surprised by the resolution, but very few will predict the unnerving coda. His emphasis on the thorny issues surrounding honor killings allows Billingham (Die of Shame, 2016, etc.) to put a new and urgent spin on his tried-and-true procedural formula. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
