Love Like Blood (Tom Thorne Novels)

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As the killers target their latest victim, Thorne takes the biggest risk of his career and is drawn into a horrifying and disturbing world in which families will do anything to protect their honour. And in keeping with the time-honored tradition, there is a final-chapter surprise to keep you on your toes.

Honour killings have also been documented in Jewish and Christian communities,' Tanners says in the book. Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakstons Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel and also won the Sherlock Award for Best Detective Created by a British Author. Since then I have read and mostly loved all of them and whilst I think every crime fan will have now read a Mark Billingham novel, if you are one of the unlikely few that haven’t, then I highly recommend that you do. It’s a great crime novel with fascinating characters, wry (and welcome) humor, and a plot filled with unexpected twists. Always in trouble with his superiors, always following his own instincts, occasionally suspended, irascible, committed, etc.

Honor killings are a subject I didn’t know much about, but thanks to “Love Like Blood,” I’m now more informed. I can pretty much guarantee that any book by Mark Billingham featuring Tom Thorne will be a 5 star before I even read it, and Love Like Blood is no exception. Thorne is one of my favourite fictional detectives and I love his friendship with Phil Hendricks, his general outlook on life, his love of curries and country music, just everything about him. They endanger other people's lives by not sharing their theories, they have ridiculous tactics and barely seem to do any work. It is not preaching to the reader, but it does bring to our attention a most heinous, sociocultural practice which is at odds with the freedom we associate with our country.

Turning to her good friend Tom Thorne she persuades him to help her uncover the truth behind the killings within the Muslim community, contracted out to hired assassins. Fortunately is this story a confession leads to the links in the religious organisations and several arrests. Informed and horrified - that in the name of religion families could commit violence and murder against female relatives who are accused of bringing shame to the family. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The narrative zips along, solid police procedural, with characters that have fully developed into familiar people throughout the course of the series. The topic of honour killings was a novel one, but otherwise this was a straightforward police procedural.

In Love like Blood, two young teens disappear and Thorne is sure it is connected to one of his unsolved cases from 4 years ago, where a young Indian woman disappeared. In an earlier book, homeless men are being murdered in a seemingly serial killer fashion, andThorne goes undercover, living for months on the street.The detectives find a link to two men seen near the pair on the underground and CCTV shows the pair being hustled out of a station into a car. He agrees but quickly finds that working in such controversial territory is dangerous in more ways than one. With the threat of another attack hanging over them, and the emergence of another family who seem to want their daughter offed, we head towards a complex ending with a couple of big twists in the tail. The threads in the plot line are well thought out and brought together, although a little suddenly at the end. This is not a case of preaching the horrors of honour killings, although they are clearly outlined here, but it is also more than mere entertainment.