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As FROM THE DEAD opens, Tom Thorne is poised to celebrate the conviction of an smugly confidant judo instructor, Adam Chambers, for the murder of one of his students, although her body has never been found. Thorne is to be bitterly disappointed. Meanwhile, he is approached by an apprentice private investigator who is trying to find why her client is getting recent photographs of the husband she was supposed to have had killed ten years earlier. Thorne is initially reluctant to have anything to do with this case, but he becomes convinced that Alan Longford is not in fact dead, despite the charred corpse found in his burnt-out car, the apparent victim of a hit hired by his wife. Not only is Longford not dead, but he is living the good life in Spain and pulling the odd lethal string back home in London to protect himself. Furthermore, he may be responsible for his daughter's disappearance, and missing young women are a weak point for Thorne. There's another reason why Thorne decides to pursue Longford. He is very taken with the young private investigator, Anna Carpenter, who has brought him into the case. Anna is what P D James's Cordelia Gray might look like, fifty years on. Bored with her bank job, she has apprenticed herself to a lazy licensed private investigator, hoping to find excitement, even meaning in the job, only to find herself bait in one divorce honey trap after another. She fizzes with enthusiasm for the Longford job and cannot stop talking about it and anything else that pops into her head. Thorne tells himself he can't stand her, but her energy and life are shaking him out of the malaise he has felt since the death of his unborn child. It's precisely this interesting sort of relationship that lifts Billingham's series above and beyond the ordinary run of police procedurals. And this time around, watching poor Tom sweat his way through an early Spanish summer doesn't hurt either. Cleverly conceived and tightly plotted, by turns tense, moving, and surprising, FROM THE DEAD is Billingham at his best. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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