Sleepyhead

Mark Billingham
Little, Brown and Company, £9.99
ISBN 0316 85696 7
Rating: ****

“Unlucky to be alive.” A number of young women have died mysteriously from brainstem strokes, and only when one survives is it clear that these were murders of the strangest kind. Alison is the unfortunate one: she survived. She is paralysed in a hospital bed with locked-in syndrome—exactly where the killer wants her. The dead women are merely byproducts of the learning curve to fulfil the killer's fantasy.

This new crimewriter brings us an original plot and a psychopath with a twisted motive. The characters are assuredly crafted, but they remain recognisable as the stock stereotypes from crime novels. Our hero is the lonely and obsessed, but basically honest and driven, Detective Inspector Thorne; Alison is our broken, but gutsy, heroine. Dr Anne Coburn is a strong single mother who, as consultant neurologist, provides the medical lead in the story. Also there is a suitably shifty anaesthetist as the main suspect and the reliable Holland as Thorne's sidekick.

I was gripped from the outset by this latest entrant to the crime genre, and I read with suspense as the investigation, along with Thorne and Coburn's inevitable love tryst, developed. The best updates come from Alison herself, who tells us about her musings from the sideroom and the revelations that she has overheard from gossiping nurses and the good Dr Coburn. Alison is soon communicating by blinking to spell out words on a blackboard à la The diving bell and the butterfly, a book that may have gaven Billingham the idea for his story. She seems to adapt remarkably well to her sudden loss of all bodily control—except for that essential eyelid—and is portrayed as a bright and humorous character. I find this hard to believe, but a depressed, bitter, cripple yearning for death would make a less sympathetic main character.

The author plays on the most dreaded of all the horrors in the medical encyclopaedia to bring us a fresh crime thriller with an unusual twist. At the end of a hard day's studying this offers a little bit of intrigue and escapism in the guise of a modern take on the good oldfashioned whodunit.