Publisher's Weekly Review
The line between cop and criminal becomes dangerously blurred in Billingham's excellent stand-alone thriller. Told from multiple points-of-view and full of red herrings, the story begins in the London suburbs with a gang initiation. Hoping to climb the ranks in a local gang and egged on by his friends, 17-year-old Theo Shirley fires a gun into a woman's car on a rainy night. The woman isn't killed, but her car plows into a crowded bus stop, killing Det. Sgt. Paul Hopwood. Paul's pregnant girlfriend, Det. Constable Helen Weeks, also a member of the Metropolitan Police, can't accept that his death was an accident. She retraces his footsteps and discovers unsettling connections between Paul and Frank Linnell, a powerful player in the shadowy London underworld with his own reasons for unraveling Paul's death. Best known for the Det. Insp. Tom Thorne series (Buried, etc.), Billingham does for South London what Richard Price does for Manhattan's Lower East Side in Lush Life. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Billingham's series sort-of-hero, DI Tom Thorne (Buried, 2007, etc.), has to settle for a supporting role, practically a walk-on, in this tangled tale of what happens after an aspiring gang member shoots into a car in London. Theo Shirley is ready to move up. Now that he's sold enough drugs to support a girlfriend and a baby son, his mate Easy Dennison offers him a boost up the next rung of the ladder. As part of his initiation, Theo's taken out one night in a car without headlights. When the driver of a BMW flashes her lights at his car, he's ordered to shoot into her back seat, and his target, Sarah Ruston, runs her BMW into a bus stop. The result is disaster for another unlikely family: DS Paul Hopwood and his girlfriend Helen Weeks, who's carrying a baby that may or may not be his. Relations have been cool between Paul and Helen ever since he found out about the fling she had at a particularly inopportune time. Now they're never going to warm up again. It's a sad story of random gang violence, but not, it seems, an uncommon one--except for a series of dark revelations. First, the accident may have had less to do with drugs than an internal investigation by the police; second, there's a growing suspicion that the freak accident may not have been so accidental after all; third, somebody is evidently closing the case a step ahead of the authorities by killing the friends in Theo's gang, leaving him the odd man out in more ways than one. The detection is hit or miss--mostly miss--but Americans who think the bleak world George Pelecanos brings to life is limited to the nation's capital will find Billingham's atmospheric maze of London byways just as sprawling and squiggling with desperate cops and robbers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Fans of Billingham's Detective Inspector Tom Thorne will find this tale of a pregnant policewoman out to solve the killing of her copper husband thin gruel indeed. Thorne makes a couple of perfunctory cameos, but those appearances underscore what's lacking here fully realized characters whom readers will be moved to care about. Too often, protagonist Helen Weeks and the other players make ridiculous choices designed to move the plot forward. And what a plot it is: street-gang initiate shoots at a car, which then plows into Weeks' husband at a bus stop, prompting his courtly mobster friend to eradicate the young toughs. The shooter, Theo, is a teenage dad from the projects who wouldn't have started dealing drugs if he'd come from posh circumstances. Though readers know this, it's astonishing (and not in a good way) when Weeks starts feeling and acting toward the young man in a way that suggests she, too, has been reading the book. Billingham has become a major player in the British crime-fiction world, but this is a definite misstep. Fans will stick with him, and libraries will need to have all the Thorne novels on the shelf.--Sennett, Frank Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Billingham's (Death Message; Buried) first stand-alone thriller is aptly titled, as both readers and characters are in the dark through most of the story. The novel revolves around an incident that takes place one dark London night when a gang initiation gone wrong results in the death of a police officer. His wife, Helen, nine months pregnant and also a police officer, discovers some strange things in his effects and begins to poke around in his recent work, which leads her to fear she didn't know her husband well at all. Meanwhile, the gang responsible for the death is being gunned down in its South London territory, and neither the police nor the gang knows who is responsible. Billingham writes sensitively and sympathetically about both the pregnant wife and the gang initiate while keeping the tension high with suspenseful plot twists. Readers of the genre will enjoy this somber and clever mystery.--Lisa O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs., Winnipeg (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.