Honour killings have also been documented in Jewish and Christian communities,' Tanners says in the book. And when a young couple goes missing, they have a chance to investigate a case that is anything but cold. The detectives find a link to two men seen near the pair on the underground and CCTV shows the pair being hustled out of a station into a car. Billingham skilfully gets his distaste at the subject across to the reader through Thorne’s reactions, while still leaving them the scope to make their own minds up about what has occurred.

That's not to say it's not well-written, just not indulgent in the sense of using description for description's sake. She is now on compassionate leave but insists on pursuing the case off the books, and knows Thorne is just the man to jump into the fire with her. The narrative zips along, solid police procedural, with characters that have fully developed into familiar people throughout the course of the series.

Et, si le livre se lit bien, la fluidité du style trahit quand même un manque de densité, de contenu.

I can pretty much guarantee that any book by Mark Billingham featuring Tom Thorne will be a 5 star before I even read it, and Love Like Blood is no exception. Billingham does justice to a subject that could be handled badly during an era of rampant Islamophobia, never climbing on a soap box but treating the topic with the shades of complexity and ethical clarity it deserves. Sans doute Mark Billingham aurait-il pu se montrer plus incisif, mais poser le problème n'est déjà pas si mal.And how he and Hendricks lamented the fact they would much rather be eating a curry from the Bengal Lancer and not the curry house local to where Thorne now lives.