The Road to Hell is Paved with Atonements (Cry Baby thriller REVIEW)

It could be a scene from anywhere… a couple of young mothers—good friends—taking their kids to play in a neighborhood park. The women kick back on a bench in the shade to chat, while their little boys climb on the jungle gym, swoosh down the slides, and burn off excess energy as only a couple of active seven-year-olds can. 

When one of the women heads off to the restrooms, the other decides to sneak a quick cigarette—she’s been trying to quit, but isn’t there, yet—which requires rooting around in the depths of her handbag for the elusive lighter. It’s only once she’s finally lit up and taken that first drag, that she notices the children are nowhere in sight… but then she hears them, faintly, in the woods bordering the park on one side, and relaxes; they’ll soon tire of the trees and come tearing across the playground again. 


The first mom returns, upset enough to find her friend smoking… but far more so when she doesn’t see the boys. Waving off the other’s explanations, she runs over to the woods, shouting for them. After a couple of moments, a rustling among the fallen leaves signals the boys are on their way back. Only one boy—bawling his head off—emerges from the trees, though… and that boy isn’t her son.


It could be a crime from anywhere… but this time, it’s in London, in 1996, and it’s down to a troubled young detective—DS Tom Thorne—already weighted down with personal problems aplenty, to bring the missing lad home, in Mark Billingham’s newest, Cry Baby.

_______________


We’ve seen a lot of Tom Thorne over the years (beginning with the  superb Sleepyhead in 2001), but we’ve never seen this exact Tom… just thirty-five years old, in the middle of a very messy divorce, and haunted by an old case in which his own error in judgment played a part in the deaths of three little girls. This Tom isn’t as sure of himself, of his co-workers, of his job, or of life, in general… but he is sure of one thing: that he’ll do anything to solve this case.

 

Will history repeat itself, though, or will Tom find a way to make up for a past mistake… that is the question.

_______________


As a long-time reader of Billingham’s Thorne series, it was an unexpected pleasure to travel back in time in Cry Baby, and observe Tom as—not a newbie, exactly, but certainly as a man in over his head, just trying not to crack from the pressures pounding at him from all sides. (His first meeting and subsequent getting-to-know-you interactions with pathologist pal Phil Hendricks are a real treat.)


In typical Billingham style, all of the major (and some of the minor) players are given enough space to breathe and feel alive to us, rather than merely serving as names on a page to whom stuff happens. 


My only complaint, to be honest, is the sheer amount of time devoted to soccer, which, maybe if you’re a big soccer fan… and you rabidly followed the sport in 1996 (or are a soccer-stats nerd)… would be of interest to you? (Eventually, I had to just skim through all those paragraphs and pages discussing scores and players and plays and rivalries and… yeah. Meh.)


Overall, though, this is Billingham—and Thorne, et al—in fine form, and an easy recommendation for all fans of the series.

~GlamKitty


Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more