I'm starting to forget what the murder team looks like and I don't particularly like Helen Weeks, Tom's latest girlfriend/colleague,. If you enjoy police procedural novels with great characterisation then this series is the one for you. Two schoolgirls are abducted in the small, dying Warwickshire town of Polesford, driving a knife into the heart of the community where police officer Helen Weeks grew up and from which she long ago escaped.

She's either withdrawn or spoiling for a fight, leaving Tom baffled as to the cause of her behaviour. However Billingham keeps the tension flowing for the most part by skilfully casting suspicion on most of the male characters in turn.Good story line, probably helped in my head by the familiarity of most of the locations and experience of what they are like when they flood.

Helen is there ostensibly to help an old school friend whose husband is charged with the crimes, and Tom gets nosy and pushes his way into the investigation even though it’s outside his jurisdiction and he’s clearly not particularly welcome. While he has no authority or connection to the case he begins to question the way the investigation is going and starts to pursue avenues of his own. uk/landing-page/little-brown-book-group/little-brown-book-group-company-information/">Little, Brown Book Group Limited. Tom and Helen find themselves in a the small English town where Helen grew up in the middle of a kidnapping/murder investigation. Now the unspoken rule with crime books is that the author can't just pluck the guilty party out of thin air at the end of the book, the reader must have met the guilty party during the narrative, and using this logic I figured I sussed it all out by the mid-way point.Billingham goes to great lengths to immerse the reader in this novel – the settings are so vivid you can imagine yourself walking down the main street of the small town of Polesford.

Most of it is fairly low-level, simply a sign of a lack of imagination and facility in the author's use of vocabulary, but some of it is pretty strong.I. Tom Thorne has twice won him the Crime Novel Of The Year Award as well as the Sherlock Award for Best British Detective and been nominated for seven CWA Daggers. As you read chapter after chapter you will keep asking your self again and again who do you believe. I am from Warwickshire, living probably about 25 miles away from where the book is set, and I was able to guess the locations quite easily.

Tom Thorne is on holiday with his girlfriend DS Helen Weeks, when two girls are abducted in Helen’s home town.

When Helen realises that the man is the husband of an old friend of hers, she insists on going to Polesford to offer support. In Time of Death Mark Billingham has provided the reader with another well written, complex narrative that speaks to issues that we can all empathise with. As the local police have no interest in alternate theories or suspects, he looks into the crimes himself - and the further he investigates, the more it looks as though Bates has been expertly framed.