Joined in 2023 
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Rabbit Hole is authentic, raucous and deeply compassionate. Expertly balancing humour, tension and pathos, it'll do for the psychiatric ward what The Thursday Murder Club has done for retirement villages. A deeply compelling read * Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange * Uh huh, a patient is murdered and Alice, as police, decides to work the case from inside. Great premise! Oh, Alice is a wonderfully unreliable narrator! She has memory issues, is paranoid and takes a boatload of meds every day - as does everyone she lives with. The killer could be any one of the residents.
More than just about any book I’ve read, I HAD to know how it would all come together.”— Linwood Barclay Mark Billingham was born and brought up in Birmingham. Having worked for some years as an actor and more recently as a TV writer and stand-upcomedian his first crime novel was published in 2001.The book took me a long time to read which is never a good sign. Alice was hard to engage with although I did care what happened to her and was curious about how the book would end. I loved the sense of looking out for each other that Al had with some of the other patients and whilst there are two murders, I found this to be a heartwarming story. With each of his books, Mark Billingham gets better and better. These are stories and characters you don’t want to leave.”— Michael Connelly The unreliable narrator has been a favorite vehicle for authors in recent years. Here, Billingham gives us perhaps the most unreliable narrator of all: A woman sectioned into a mental health ward following a psychotic episode brought on by PTSD. This woman is a former police detective who, although having been medically retired from the force, still sees herself as on the Job.
On the Fleet Ward of a psychiatric hospital for those that have been sectioned, a patient has been brutally murdered. Told and thought in the first person by DCI Alice Armitage, working alone, she deep dig investigates the murder; I suppose that there's one thing I should also mention, Alice is also an in-patient in the Ward! They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But now one of their number is found murdered, and the accusations begin to fly.Superb . . . Billingham adds tantalizing red herrings throughout. The book’s masterly ending features a heart-stopping chase to apprehend Kieron’s surprising kidnapper. Established fans and newcomers alike will be thrilled.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Cry Baby Out of nowhere, there's some clunky Q&A-type dialogue thrown in regarding how the mentally ill are people too and what it's like to be afflicted, which I found pretty heavy-handed and lip service-y as well as structurally redundant, as it was the author's job to let us live inside the head of one such person -- I get that writing a coherent, structured novel from the perspective of a character who can trust neither her thoughts nor her recollection nor her perceptions is basically the toughest job imaginable, but, well, you know, if you take it on, you take it on, right? I could have done without that Deep Conversation with the café lady, as well as the cringe-inducing messaging between Alice and her former flatmate that added nothing to the narrative except a little padding (strings of emojis, anyone? I think I already used the word "juvenile", so I won't bring it up again). Genres: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural, Women Sleuths, Thrillers, Crime, Psychological, General, Suspense Billingham's picture of the ward and its staff is full of humanity, leaving us with a clear sense that this kind of illness could affect any of us, and the story offers an excellent twist. He gets better and better. * Literary Review *
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