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SCAREDY CAT
by Mark Billingham
Little Brown UK, August 2002
371 pages
10.99 GBP
ISBN: 0316859532


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Scaredy Cat is the second in a series featuring DI Thorne and his team. Two women are found strangled at railway stations in different parts of London. The women died at roughly the same time. Coincidence? Thorne doesn't think so and starts looking for similar parallels in other murders in recent months. The investigation weaves back and forth through the past and the present, peeling away the layers as it reveals the reasons behind the awful destruction of innocent lives. This is a book about fear - those who can instill it, and those who are its victims. It certainly made MY heart beat faster, scaring me half to death. Thinking back, there's actually very little gore, but it left me with such a feeling of horror, that I could almost smell the blood.

The characters are excellent and itís easy to become involved in their lives. Mark Billingham has a real skill for portraying a well rounded character with just a few sentences. Victims, killers and police all come alive on the page. Thorne and his team are particularly good and I look forward to following them on many more cases.

I would have preferred to have read Scaredy Cat only in the cheery daylight hours, but the writing was so good that I just had to keep turning the pages. I loved the first book in the series - Sleepyhead - and in a lot of ways Scaredy Cat is even more effective. Personally speaking I did prefer the first book. Sleepyhead is one of the best books Iíve read for a long time, mainly due to one outstanding and utterly memorable character. Scaredy Cat is darker, and sometimes visits places that, if it were a movie, would have me hiding behind the sofa. But that's just my personal preference. It doesn't take away from the fact that this is a bloody good book.

Visit Donna's Page at: http://freespace.virgin.net/donna.moore

Note: No US edition

Reviewed by Donna Moore, August 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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