The Burning Girl (Hardcover) by Mark Billingham

CONDITION Very Good

A NOVEL by Mark Billingham
CATEGORY Crime
PUBLICATION Little Brown

EDITION
Hardcover ISBN 9780316725736 [£10]

SYNOPSIS
X marks the spot - & when that spot is a corpse's naked back & the X is carved in blood, DI Tom Thorne is in no doubt that the dead man is the latest victim of a particularly vicious contract killer. It's morbid & messy - but it's a mystery with plenty of clues. This is turf warfare between North London gangs, Organised crime boss Billy Ryan is moving into someone else's patch, & that someone is not best pleased.

Thorne's already got plenty on his plate when he agrees to help out ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain, frantically raking through the ashes of an old case that has come back to haunt her. When schoolgirl Jessica Clare was turned into a human torch twenty years ago, it made horrific headlines. But now there's something worrying in the small print: Gordon Rooker, the man Carol put away for the crime, is up for possible release, & it seems there's a copycat at large. Or perhaps it's someone trying to 'right' a few wrongs. For Jessica Clarke was the victim of mistaken identity. The intended target was the daughter of gangland boss, a woman who would later grow up & marry a man named Billy Ryan...

For Thorne, what starts as a tenuous link becomes two pieces of the same puzzle. Past & present gradually fuse together to form a new, & very nasty, riddle. & when an X is carved on Thorne's front door, he knows that the smouldering embers of a long-dead case are about to erupt into flames...