Love Like Blood by Mark Billingham

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Grove Atlantic on June 20, 2017

Love Like Blood is set in today’s England, where violent crimes against minorities are on the increase after Brexit, which some saw as mandate to be vicious. Honor crimes are the specific theme — crimes typically committed against women who have “dishonored” a family by, for instance, having sex — and the low priority that the police give to those crimes.

The second plotline involves the murder of Susan Best, the lover of DI Nicola Tanner. Although Tanner cannot officially investigate her lover’s murder, she enlists the help of Tom Thorne to do just that. Tanner met Thorne in Die of Shame.

Tanner has been investigating a series of honor killings carried out by a pair of hit men. She thinks those hit men were paid to kill her, to end the investigation, but they bungled the job and killed Susan Best by mistake. Of course, she carries the burden of guilt since she assumes her job got her lover killed.

The two hit men, an Irishman and a Pakistani, are developed with enough depth to make them credible. The killers actually have more personality than Thorne or Tanner, both of whom are rather bland.

The investigation of the killings is interesting for a time, and then it becomes a bit tedious as the investigators cover the same ground again and again. Billingham seems to be in love with his own prose. The prose is just fine, but there’s too much of it. In this case (as was true in Die in Shame), a tighter novel would have been a better novel.

The most revealing chapter of Love Like Blood comes near the end, when a culprit explains why honor killings promote “family values” that communities have a right to protect when the government refuses to see things through the lens of their religion. The speech applies equally to members of every religion who believe that their “family values” should outweigh laws that protect all of society. The novel makes the telling point that too many people believe any antisocial behavior, from discrimination to murder, can be justified if it is hidden behind the cloak of religion. Civil law protects all of us from religious law when members of a religion inflict their values on others by engaging in unlawful behavior.

The police manage to solve the honor killings and, at the very end, Susan Best’s killing. The solution to Best’s killing is forced and hard to swallow. The story has enough good moments to make the novel a modest success, but shining a light on honor killings (which have apparently been increasing in the UK) gives this book its value.

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Die of Shame by Mark Billingham

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 7, 2016

Nicola Tanner and Dipak Chall investigate a murder. The victim has been dead for more than two weeks before the body is found. The victim’s identity is concealed for a short time so I won’t give it away here, but it is immediately clear that the victim was a member of Tony De Silva’s addiction support group.

When he is not touring with a well-known musician as a “lifestyle coach” (e.g., he keeps the musician sober), Tony works as a therapist. Tony is a former addict whose daughter belittles him for living a boring life, knowing that he misses the good times he once had.

The other key characters are the members of Tony’s weekly group. Robin is a doctor who took too many self-prescriptions. Diana, a recovering alcoholic who is now a compulsive shopper, can’t stop obsessing about her ex-husband’s younger girlfriend. Caroline, the newest addition to the group, is a compulsive eater who is trying to give up pain pills. Heather, a “skinny junkie” with a gambling addiction, feels alone in the world, although she has developed a strong attachment to Tony. Nobody much likes Chris, a drug addict who insults other group members and belittles their woes.

After the meetings, the group members (without Tony) typically gather in a pub where they socialize over soft drinks. Events occur at various points during and after group sessions that create escalating tension among the members. The book’s title comes (in part) from Tony’s prompting each group member to discuss something shameful that they did, in the belief that they might have adopted addictive behaviors to hide from their shame.

Die of Shame is told in a series of flashbacks that alternate with scenes of the murder investigation. The flashbacks reveal the personalities of the group members and their relationships with each other. The current investigation frustrates Tanner and Chall, since the group members are unwilling to discuss anything that happens in group, and for the most part won’t talk about their interactions with each other outside of the group.

Mark Billingham does a good job of creating sympathy for troubled characters. In fact, Die of Shame works better as the story of addicts in therapy than it does as a murder mystery. The killer’s motivation is concealed for most of the novel, making it impossible to deduce the killer’s identity, despite the false clues that Billingham plants. Once that motivation is revealed, it seems contrived. Still, the strong characters and Billingham’s literary prose style kept me interested, if not engrossed, as the story moved toward its climax. A final twist at the end, resolving a minor plot element, is a clever cap to a story of people who will continue to be troubled in surprising ways long after the novel ends.

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