|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Detective Helen Weeks might have had a less stressful couple of days had she not given up smoking a few years ago when she was pregnant. Chewing gum and chocolate are her substitutes and so she drops into her corner newsagent's to stock up on the way to work. Before she knows it, she, along with another customer, has been taken hostage by the distraught proprietor, Javed Akhtar. Akhtar knows that Helen is a detective and he demands that Tom Thorne investigate the death of his son who has died in a young offenders' unit, an apparent suicide. Thorne was one of the officers who arrested his son Amin on a knife-wounding charge and was almost as shocked as Akhtar when the boy, previously blameless, received an unusually harsh sentence. Now the father is demanding the Thorne find out the truth about what happened to cause his son's death or he will shoot his hostages. We first met Helen Weeks in IN THE DARK, a standalone in which Tom Thorne made only a cameo appearance. Then she was very far along in her pregnancy and the father of her child, also a police officer, had just been killed by an out of control car as he waited for a bus. Now, she's back on the job as a Child Protection Officer and her son is a year old. It was difficult to tell from that book whether it represented the beginning of a series or if it would remain a one-off. It turns out, oddly to be neither. While THE DEMANDS does have Tom Thorne in a prominent role, he is not pursuing his usual serial killer prey, nor is Helen, chained as she is to an iron pipe, as active a participant in the investigation as she was in her previous appearance. THE DEMANDS first appeared in the UK in March under the title GOOD AS DEAD. For once, the change in title represents a clear improvement, since this book concerns a number of demands, some of them conflicting. There is, of course, the pressing demand of the grieving father, to find the truth about his son's death. There are the conflicting demands that Helen faces between her responsibility to her infant son and the professional requirements of her job. And there is the conflict between Thorne's commitment to the truth and the necessity for him to keep some things absolutely secret in violation of the rules of proper police conduct. Typically of this series, these conflicts are resolved, but by no means either neatly or happily. In the end, it is still not evident where (or if) Billingham intends to take his hero. Thorne is still his old, irascible self, willing to risk career suicide if it will bring a murderer to justice. He is as well still the policeman who has seen just about everything, but not quite enough to make him lose the ability to empathize with the desperate Akhtar even while he is holding a gun to the head of a colleague. While it is true that this series has begun to plateau, perhaps inevitably, since its extraordinary beginning in SLEEPYHEAD, there's still more than enough here to satisfy readers who have happily been following Thorne through London's streets for the past ten years. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, June 2012
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
