Mark Billingham

Detective inspector Tom Thorne investigates a series of murders of ex-convicts by an anonymous pen-pal who befriended the convicts while they were in prison and then murdered them upon their releases.

Detective Tom Thorne is forced to re-consider an old case when a grieving father takes one of Thorne's colleagues hostage and demands to know the truth about how his son died in prison from the man who put him away.

"When DI Tom Thorne is called to conduct a routine assessment at the site of a suicide, he expects to be in and out in no time. But when he arrives at the metro station, where a woman named Philippa Goodwin threw herself in front of an underground train, Thorne inexplicably senses something awry and feels compelled to dig deeper. He soon discovers that she was the victim of a callous con-man who preys on vulnerable women, and whose deception plunged...

Just as his love life hits the rocks and he must investigate Turkish gangs, Tom Thorne begins to receive blurred photos of dead men on his cell phone, murders connected to a psychopath just released from prison.