Dirty cops targeted in Thorne thriller

Det.-INsp. Tom Thorne watches four police officers get murdered right in front of him and does absolutely nothing, because even the four victims aren’t yet aware that they’ve just been murdered.

Only one deserved it in the warped sense of justice of the person who killed them — and will certainly have deserved it in the minds of some readers.

The four will be far from the last in one of the best police thrillers Mark Billingham has ever written.

What the Night Brings is the 19th Thorne murder mystery featuring our tough, jaded copper and his familiar eccentric eclectic pals and lovers: fellow DIs Nicola Tanner and Dave Holland, boss Russell Brigstocke, romantic partner Helen Weekes and, of course, pathologist Dr. Phil Hendricks — he of the goth clothing, tattoos, piercings and loud, exceptionally colourful declarations of his gayness and abundant sexual appetites.

The murder of the four bobbies is followed soon after by — OK, so you’re way ahead of us here.

Lured into a park in the middle of the night, where a woman is being followed by a strange man, a constable is stabbed repeatedly in the throat. His body cam got a clear view of the woman — so why did he shut it off before being attacked?

Meanwhile, Holland has to sign off on an obvious suicide, a courier who got a call in the middle of the night to meet a client, clambered up a very difficult steep slope and jumped to his death from a railway bridge. Holland has his doubts, but when police are getting murdered all over London, overtime budgets are going bonkers, there are priorities, Dave.

When, in any murder mystery, has a completely separate, disparate subplot ever not figured into the main plot by page 350?

Without giving too much away, this is all about rape, specifically rape by dirty cops. The cop slain in the park, he’d slipped drugs into a woman’s tea, then raped her repeatedly.

The woman was so out of it that police convinced her she couldn’t make a case; nevertheless, she also has a nagging memory that a second man was in the room, didn’t touch her, but directed the rapist to do ever more unspeakable things to her.

Does it make any difference that we don’t read first-hand about any of the attacks? It certainly doesn’t help the survivors.

There’s a man in prison for one of the rapes, a lowlife who claims he’s innocent and that he was fitted up. His wife even did a prison stint for giving him an alibi and sticking to it. His DNA was all over the woman.

How high up in the police would one have to be to engineer planting DNA? Your book club may speculate how it could be done, but better to ask Phil.

Could the lowlife actually be innocent? Can DNA be faked, switched, substituted, planted? How often in a rape allegation does a freezer in the lab go on the blink and ruin a sample?

As Thorne watches the count climb on dead coppers, the obvious question: the killer is nuts, but how does he know when and where his targeted victims are going to be? Could someone on the police force with inside information — okay, you’re ahead of us again. Just how senior could the traitor be?

What the Night Brings has Thorne and some of his colleagues wondering how they can continue to do the job when so many officers are evil.

And other women who were attacked but never properly interviewed or examined, these bits of memory of sensing someone else present when they were assaulted, a pattern emerges when clean cops do their jobs right.

What the Night Brings is by no means an easy read. People in it are insidiously evil, those with power live above the law, and tragedy may lurk on the next page. It’s outstanding.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin has trouble envisioning the actor playing Tom Thorne as anything other than the Governor on The Walking Dead; he recognizes this as a problem of little concern to anyone else.