John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
Mark Billingham’s latest novel is a stand-alone psychological thriller that tells the story of Detective Constable Alice Armitage, currently detained under Sections 2 and 3 of the Mental Health Act. Yes, Alice is a psychiatric patient at Fleet Ward, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The problem is, nobody seems to believe that she is a police woman. They seem to either humour her or laugh in her face. Importantly, Alice believes in herself and so, when a fellow patient is murdered on ward, she takes it upon herself to go about solving the murder.
In true whodunit style we are introduced to an array of other inmates as well as staff of Fleet Ward, any one of which could be the murderer or, indeed, the next victim. Alice gives most of them nicknames so we have the likes of Jamilah aka The Foot Woman, Lauren aka The Singer, Ilias aka The Grand Master and many more strange and intriguing characters. Alice really believes that she doesn’t belong there with these people. However, she is there mainly because she smashed her boyfriend in the head with a bottle after overdoing the drugs and booze and having a breakdown. Being medicated in the hospital means that at times she does not remember doing things and she becomes an unreliable witness to what is going on around her. She is on the trail of the killer but her problem may be that the killer is on to her. Will she make it to the end of the novel?
Billingham has written a story that is darkly comic and yet horribly tragic. The patients seem to live a life of medication and routine, days of boring routine of three meals a day, television in the evening and sleep. It all gets very claustrophobic which add to the atmosphere. The secondary characters are well-handled and believable but it is Alice that makes the book work. I really wouldn’t like to be her friend as she is loud-mouthed and a little bit full of herself but I do recognise that she is a fine creation by Mark and it is his expert writing that kept me gripped to the very end and made me root for Alice to escape from the rabbit hole she finds herself in.
Well worth your time.
