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    In the Dark: A Novel
    In the Dark: A Novel
    In the Dark: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    In the Dark: A Novel

    Written by Mark Billingham

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A Deadly Crash

    A rainy night in south London. A gun is fired into a car, which swerves onto the pavement and plows into a bus stop. It seems that a chilling gang initiation has cost the life of an innocent victim. But the reality is far more sinister....

    A Dangerous Quest

    One life is wiped out and three more are changed forever: the young man whose finger was on the trigger, the aging gangster planning a deadly revenge, and the pregnant woman who struggles desperately to uncover the truth. How will she, two weeks away from giving birth, now cope in a world where death is an occupational hazard?

    A Shocking Twist

    In a city where violence can be random or meticulously planned, where teenage gangs clash with career criminals, and where loyalty is paid for in blood, anything is possible. Secrets are uncovered as fast as bodies, and the story's final twist is as breathtakingly surprising as they come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 19, 2009
    ISBN9781400180349
    In the Dark: A Novel
    Author

    Mark Billingham

    Mark Billingham is the author of nine novels, including Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat, Lazybones, The Burning Girl, Lifeless, and Buried—all Times (London) bestsellers—as well as the stand-alone thriller In the Dark. For the creation of the Tom Thorne character, Billingham received the 2003 Sherlock Award for Best Detective created by a British writer, and he has twice won the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. He has previously worked as an actor and stand-up comedian on British television and still writes regularly for the BBC. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for In the Dark

    3.5/5

    18 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Mark Billingham's first stand alone novel begins with 5 teenagers joyriding and seemingly looking for a victim to shoot in a gang initiation.A woman sees the teenagers car and becomes a victim. Shots are fired into her car and she crashes into a bus stop killing Paul Hopwood an off duty police officer.Paul's girlfriend Helen Weeks is also a police officer and very pregnant. She wants to find answers to her fiance's death.There is a major police investigation but the underworld people who believe Paul was a friend are also persuing the killers. This group is led by Frank Linnell who has the contacts to find out who was in the car that struck his friend. Frank wants to make them pay for what they did.This is an intelligent story that moves between Helen's investigation, the guilf tidden teenager who reluctantly did the shooting and Paul.As the teenage members of the gang are found and things happen we see that they are just teenagers who got into a gang and how that changed their lives.The plot is well done and seemingly heads to an expected ending but Billingham gives the reader a surprise that no one could see coming.This writer continues to impress.Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing.
    • 3/5
      On a hot August night, what seemingly looks like a random shooting is so much more. Lives are lost, more lives still go in a downward spiral.Paul Hopwood, a police officer, died in that shooting. Helen Weeks, her heavily pregnant girlfriend, and also a police officer, attempts to find out what really happened on that fateful day. On the other side, gang members are being singled out and killed. One of them, Theo, struggles with his own conscience, while trying as best as he can to take care of his own small family and to prove himself to other gang members.While the story is fast-paced and somewhat interesting, the reader is pulled in many directions at once throughout the novel. The gang members are portrayed as disillusioned, heartless thugs, but Billingham is careful not to fall into stereotyping. However, the only character I found endearing, was Theo, a young gang member struggling between two worlds; that of family life, where he has to take care of his girlfriend and his young child, and the world in which the gang exists, which is a world of sex, drugs and constant violence. He wants to prove himself, yet is very reluctant in participating in these acts of violence and cruelty, which seem normal to everyone around him. The reader almost forgets that he hasn't even entered adulthood yet. Theo is only seventeen.Helen Weeks, the pregnant girlfriend in mourning, is just plain stupid. Fine, she's mourning. Fine, she's a police officer. But an investigation regarding Hopwood's murder is already in the works, but she goes off on her own, running her own investigation. She's pregnant, two weeks away from giving birth, and she risks life and limb, and that of her unborn child, to find out exactly what happened that fateful August night, and why. But then, if she hadn't acted as impulsively and stupidly as she has, there would be no story, as implausible as it this situation is.While the novel moves from one part of London to the next without too much difficulty, I found that it moves around too much, even though separate plotlines eventually converge into a coherent whole.It becomes painfully clear that violence is an ever present theme in this story. However, in some parts of the story, it is completely unnecessary. But in a world where teenagers, driven by desire of prestige and respect, are lured in gang warfare, violence is a way of life, one that is hard to break out of.
    • 3/5
      This is a Police procedural novel.Main character is heavily Pregnant DCI Helen Weeks who along with her Boyfriend Paul work for the Metropolitan Police.Paul is hit by a Car when he is out drinking with his friend, It looks like it was a freak accident involving a Woman in one car and some would be young Black Gangsters in the other car. Helen is not convinced she isn't sure what Paul has been up to lately but she digs deeper.She finds out he was under cover investigating Bent Coppers, the car crash was a set up by Paul's so called mate. Meanwhile one of Paul's acquaintances is really annoyed Paul has been killed and starts picking off all the Gang Members who were involved. Helen cracks the case and gives birth.
    • 3/5
      If somebody could explain to me what I did with my common-sense I'd be very grateful. I have this list of favourite authors, and a tendency to hoard their books. Makes no sense whatsoever when I think about it, but IN THE DARK got caught in the daftness and lurked on the shelves here for much much longer than it should have.A standalone novel, IN THE DARK is a thriller with an unexpected scenario and an interesting twist. As the blurb outlines, there's a car crash in the night. A driver is forced off the road, into a bus stop. A man (in this case a policeman) is dead. His partner, a policewoman, wants to know why. Why him, what was he doing just before he died, who on earth was the man she thought she knew, how will she explain who he was and what happened to their very soon to be born child.IN THE DARK is not just the story of her investigation into her partner's death, it's also very much a story about relationships, complications, unfinished business and how people deal with grief. You can just about taste Helen's desperation to do something, investigate, find the truth, anything rather than just sit and grieve for her partner. As she acknowledges an affair she has had, and the affect that it had on their partnership, she also starts to realise that there are things about Paul that she may not know. Despite a very advanced pregnancy she doesn't want to let it go, let other's seek the truth, her policewoman's instinct is too strong, and her need to be involved overwhelming. What stays with me still after I've finished reading this book is the way that Billingham has written such a finally balanced portrayal of this woman. The other thing that has stayed is how sudden death can leave such an emotional minefield behind. That's not to say that this book isn't a thriller at the same time. The investigation has a pace of it's own, which is enhanced by the knowledge that as Helen's baby is due very soon, her deadline is immovable. Interspersed with Helen's search for the truth there are other stories, other people involved that night. The impact of gangs and crime is an angle which is explored, but interestingly not completely demonised. Combine a lot of elements that worked really well as the story progressed, with some final twists and turns as the book draws to a close, and this was one of those excellent thrillers that really makes you stop and think. Serves me right for taking so long to read IN THE DARK. Note to self: try not to make the same mistake with the next book - series or not.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing.
    • 5/5
      There are villains and cops that you can form a fast love-hate relationship with. Mark Billingham has been a long-time favorite author of mine but I hadn't red anything by him in quiet some time, so I was glad to find this one while browsing the library. The story starts with a weapon fired, a car crash and a dead Police officer as a result. Is it a gang initiation gone wrong, or the perfect excitation? The plot follows the results of the shooting, the story of the shooter and his "friends", a young pregnant woman looking for answers and a gangster seeking revenge, This is a book that will keep you reading. You won't be putting it down anytime soon.
    • 4/5
      After having written several very successful novels centred on the cynical, yet also empathetic, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, Mark Billingham introduced a new protagonist for this book. As it happens, DI Thorne does feature, but in a very peripheral role (and not identified by name until the closing pages).The focus of the novel moves between Theo, a member of a South London gang principally involved in selling drugs, but with other criminal activities thrown in, and Helen Weeks, a pregnant police officer who has her own domestic issues to resolve. Ordinarily their lives would ever have intersected, but when Theo is pressed to complete and initiation task, their paths become intertwined.Once again Mark Billingham serves up an enticing story, with plenty of plot twists. The narrative is split between following Helen or Theo, with occasional other perspectives thrown in. This was a great thriller, that captivated the reader from the first page.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the listening very much. The story has got a lot of twists and turns and I was guessing along with Helen if her partner was involved in some criminal act himself or if he was working undercover. Sometimes it was really gripping, but there were other times I felt like bobbing up and down through the plot.
    • 3/5
      I had a hard time getting into this story at the beginning, as a large cast of seemingly unrelated people got introduced and the story seemed to be going nowhere slowly. But around the middle it picked up and the web linking all these people started to emerge. I finally quite liked it overall, but there were a lot of loose ends as the tale was more about the environment than than the individuals.

      I added whispersync after about 20% of the book to speed me up - big mistake! The narrator makes no effort to make the listener aware of changes in perspective (which are happening quite often) and gives really weird voices (straight out of looney tunes) to some individuals that do not fit the book at all.
    • 4/5
      "In the Dark" is the first novel published by Billingham that is not part of the Thorne series. But that does not mean that it is not a Thorne novel. At the time when it was written, it probably was not planned to be - Thorne shows up for a minute, mostly to put the story in the same timeline and space. But then Helen Weeks showed up in Thorne's life and things are a bit different. Because this is the story of Helen, her baby and her dead boyfriend - we had heard some things about Paul's death (so some of the surprises in this book are a bit spoiled if you had read the Thorne series) but not all the details. And it does not stop the novel from presenting a few surprises. The story does not get told linearly - we see the main event at the start before Billingham returns back to tell us how things got there and then when that start moment comes, it picks up the story and continues. In a way, it makes you pay attention to details, wondering which ones will be important although it is not really needed - the linear structure would have worked. And the story looks pretty straight forward - a boy from the projects, Theo, who managed to escape the bad influence by moving out comes back. And once he is back in the old gang, things escalate very fast - until he kills a policeman: Paul Hopwood. Technically it is an accident - he shoots at a car, the car veers into a bus stop and Paul is hit and killed. But the police is after the shooters - after all a policeman had died. Paul and his girlfriend Helen Weeks, who also works in the police, are about to have a child when he dies. A phone call and a remark from a friend makes Helen wonder if Paul was what she believed him to be. And while she is following his actions in the last two weeks of his life, she finds connections that cannot be explained. In the meantime the gang that got him killed start having serious problems - and the dead bodies start piling up. And then the truth start emerging - slowly and unexpectedly and every time you think you know what had happened, something new happens and the story leads you elsewhere. It is a good novel - not as strong as most of the Thorne series but still strong. The lack of Thorne is not really what is missing - it is the rest of his team that makes the series novels shine and that special relationship is missing. But the story itself is strong enough and if you like the Thorne series, I would recommend this novel (and maybe read it before Good as Dead/The Demands. Warning: It is a dark novel and bad things happen to people. So if you are too squeamish, Billingham is not for you.
    • 3/5
      It turns out this was a great title for this confusing mess of a mystery because I was in the dark most of the time. The book opens with a car crash. A driver is forced off the road and into a bus stop where a man is killed. His partner, a heavily pregnant policewoman, wants to know why. What was he doing just before he died and was he even the man she thought she knew. The only character I even remotely liked was Theo, the young gang member who has dreams of bettering his life and escaping from the city with his girlfriend and baby son, but who gets caught up in peer pressure and fast-moving violence.

      The final twist isn't really that dramatic, and the reader will have to make a couple of leaps of faith along the way. If you like your mysteries neatly tied up you won't care at all for the ending. It's the kind of ending where you wonder whether the publisher forgot to include the final chapter. It was hard going and I struggled to finish it. I've heard his Tom Thorne series is better so I'm giving Mark Billingham one more chance to convince me.
    • 4/5
      This is a gripping thriller that is very difficult to put down. The book tells the story of a death that appears to be one thing (a gang initiation shooting), but is something else altogether. The author is not afraid to humanize all of his characters - from Helen, the pregnant cop trying to solve the mystery of her fiance's murder to Theo, a gangbanger who might decide to change his life. The characters and situations were compelling and readable and I empathized with just about all of them, even though all of them were full of flaws. This is the first stand-alone from an author who writes a police inspector series that I haven't read. I'm going to have to go find his other books since many readers say they're better than this one and I really enjoyed this one. If you're looking for a thriller that will keep you entertained and turning pages, this is a good one.
    • 3/5
      Ok Mr. Billingham, I'm going to give you another chance. I somehow think this is an 'off' book. It was slow to start with too many characters introduced at once, the middle had a pick up moment but fell flat at the end of the book. Was there really an ending to this book? I have unanswered questions and was Helen's baby male or female? It was my first Billingham book but I'm going to try your Tom Thorne series as I have seen that others have enjoyed it. If you haven't read any of Mark's books, don't start with this one as you may pass up his others.
    • 1/5
      READ IN DUTCH

      I really disliked this book. I was looking forward to reading this one, but it disappointed me to a point in which I'm probably never going to touch a book by Mark Billingham again. (They say first impressions are very important, with writers this is exactly the same)

      I didn't really liked the story, it was very unrealistic and uninteresting. And, - I don't know whether or not this has to do with the translation - but the writing style was simply painful. Full of apparently cool words, gangsta style, showing how streetwise I am kind of writing style. I hated it. Took my about two months to finish this book.