Detective Inspector Tom Thorne now knows that three murdered young women were a killer’s mistakes — and that Alison was his triumph. And unless Thorne can enter the mind of a brilliant madman — a frighteningly elusive fiend who enjoys toying with the police as much as he savors his sick obsession — Alison Willetts will not be the last victim consigned forever to a hideous waking hell.
Already an international bestseller, Mark Billingham’s “Sleepyhead” is a chilling masterwork of crime fiction — a boldly original experiment in terror that will beget dark dreams and sleepless nights.
Blurb from the 2003 Avon Books edition
A killer has been targetting women in London and inducing fatal strokes in them. The last victim survived however, conscious, but paralysed. Able only to blink.
Unfortunately, this is a bit of a tedious read. I am only halfway through and am losing the will to live.
Part of the problem is the multi character viewpoint, including their conscious thoughtstream, and although it is obvious at most points who is thinking what, it is often unclear.
This I suspect is a result of Billingham being primarily a screenwriter. Paradoxically, if this were a BBC four part drama it would probably work very well. Billingham seems to be employing visual drama devices in a novel, but they need to be handled differently in order to be effective and here they are just not.
It seems pretty obvious at this point who the killer is, although one suspects this may be a massive piece of misdirection.
Apart from the main character, Tom Thorne, the rest of the cast are a little one-dimensional. One character is exposed (no pun intended) to the reader as someone who enjoys rubbing his aroused body against women on the London Underground. This is never mentioned again, and the section serves no function within the novel whatsoever.
Again, Billingham resorts to visual techniques and describes people physically in far too much detail, particularly Thorne’s boss, Keable.
‘Frank Keable was only a year or two older than Thorne but looked fifty. This was more due to some genetic glitch than any kind of stress. The lads reckoned he must have started receding at about the same time he hit puberty, judging by the proximity of his hairline to the nape of his neck. Whatever hormones he had left that stimulated hair growth had somehow been mistakenly rerouted to his eyebrows, which hovered above his bright blue eyes like great grey caterpillars. The eyebrows were highly expressive and gave him an air of wisdom that was, to put it kindly, fortunate. Nobody begrudged him this bit of luck – it was the least you could hope for when you looked like an overfed owl with alopecia. Keable put one of his caterpillars to good use, raising it questioningly.’
There is an art to providing a physical sketch of this nature, and the secret is brevity. George Bellairs and PG Wodehouse for instance, could whip up a fully formed image in a couple of sentences. Here, it is a tad strained with a humour that is inconsistent with the rest of the book.
Having now finished the novel, I can say that it does liven up a little around halfway through, but it is too little too late. Again it suffers from leaps of viewpoint from one character to another without knowing who is thinking or being observed.
The denouement is handled well but there’s an afterbirth of epilogues in which other things are resolved.
It’s a book which at the time needed a serious page diet (of at least a third) and an overhaul by an editor.
A little late in the day for that though.
Bodies In The Library 