Book review: Rush Of Blood, Mark Billingham

THERE’S often an interesting dynamic between people who befriend each other on holiday. What they had in common for those 14 nights is sometimes little more than sangria and sunshine and what can feel like a close friendship thousands of miles from home can cool off once the mercury drops.

It’s this dynamic that Mark Billingham – creator of the Detective Inspector Tom Thorne novels – explores in his standalone thriller Rush Of Blood.

Three English couples meet and bond on a package holiday in Florida. But the last day of their trip is tainted when a teenage girl staying at their resort goes missing.

Returning home, they make vague plans to meet up with little intention of actually doing so, until one of the group holds them to it and begins a cycle of dinner parties. The case of the missing girl is a footnote in their conversations, a mere canapé. Until, that is, her body is discovered, and another girl, with a similar profile to the first, is abducted not far from where they all live. Meanwhile neither a trainee detective in England nor a rather more jaded one in the US can let the respective cases go.

There’s a touch of central casting to the six characters; the attractive actress, the gossipy housewife, the nerd, the handsome womaniser who considers himself the “life and soul”. The three couples don’t particularly like one another. Dinners, drinks, coffees are all borne out of a sense of obligation, the feeling that once one couple has played host the others are duty bound to take their turn.

Dialogue is perfectly pitched, much of it a very believable chitchat only slightly elevated above small talk. It is a credit to Billingham’s skill as a writer that his characters reveal so much to the reader when blethering around the dinner table while revealing so little to one another.

Divided into sections examining each couple as they host a dinner party, anonymous, first-person observations from the killer pop up between chapters. These interludes make it clear that the murders are the work of a calculating psychopath, and the fact that the reader knows that person is one of the six pals discussing good schools and house extensions makes them all the more chilling and compelling.

However, the murders themselves, the discovery of the bodies and the glimpses into the mind of the killer all play second fiddle to the insights into these six characters, none of whom are particularly likeable. There are no suspicions in the group that the killer might be sitting among them, but nonetheless as they get to know one another they don’t like what they see.

Billingham does little to attempt to entice the reader to guess the identity of the killer; all six “friends” tell small lies to the police, all have their sadnesses and their secrets. Almost any one of them seems capable of murder and any reader trying to guess the culprit’s identity will be doing so to the very end.

Little, Brown, £16.99

Edinburgh International Book Festival, today