Ultimately, though, this is a gritty and realistic crime drama, certainly in keeping with Billingham's normal high standards. The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. The one character I did want to see more of was Theo, the young gang member who has dreams of bettering his life and escaping from the sink estate with his girlfriend and baby son, but who gets caught up in peer pressure and fast-moving violence.

How will she, two weeks away from giving birth, now cope in a world where death is an occupational hazard? Whether he actually fired the shot that caused the killing or not, he was prepared to do so, so the premise that he was in some way a good person seems flawed. In Billingham's thrilling eighth crime novel featuring London police detective Tom Thorne (after Death Message), Thorne welcomes the distraction of a new case after his girlfriend, Det.This was at a point where I simply had to know what happened and I ended up turning down a good night's sleep as I felt compelled to see how things ended. The most interesting thing – the central murder mystery – could have been gone into further, and carried on for one more episode, at least, with more character development and more resolution of plot/character strands that had been set in motion.

So it was a minor relief that his latest novel In the Dark was to be a standalone one, even if early optimism was dulled by the rather clichéd tagline …it's where fear lives, which didn't seem quite in keeping with Billingham's normal style. It's a story that could have been lifted directly from the newspaper headlines – gun crime in London, gang violence and bystanders caught up in what happens. Now I'm aware it’s not the most salubrious of neighbourhoods, that it’s a bit scruffy and run-down, but there’s no need to paint it as the British equivalent of streets of ‘The Wire’.The case sees the heavily-pregnant detective thrown head first in the shady underworld of organised crime in Manchester. In a city where violence can be random or meticulously planned, where teenage gangs clash with career criminals and where loyalty is paid for in blood, anything is possible. The result is disaster for another unlikely family: DS Paul Hopwood and his girlfriend Helen Weeks, who’s carrying a baby that may or may not be his. I really enjoyed this engrossing tale of pregnant DC Helen Weeks and her complicated home life, allied with a slice of south-east London gun culture.

She retraces his footsteps and discovers unsettling connections between Paul and Frank Linnell, a powerful player in the shadowy London underworld with his own reasons for unraveling Paul's death. Except the Lewisham of this book is not quite the Lewisham I know, Here it’s home to nothing but gangs of drug dealers and juvenile thugs, where violence is only ever seconds away from hitting the streets. Billingham says: "We were working on the script for the third film (three TV episodes), all just moving ahead quite happily and unbeknown to us a new head of drama was coming in and she did not want to recommission anything her predecessor had done.In the first story, Helen finds out that she is pregnant and becomes involved in a case in which the husband of her childhood best friend is accused of kidnapping two young girls. It's a dry night, but the road is still greasy from the shower a few hours before; slick as it's sucked under the headlights, and there's not too much traffic rattling across the cracks in a main drag that's probably the worst maintained in the city.

And within the first few pages I had to look when Mark Billingham wrote it, because it sounded a bit strange. It's pointless and stupid; asking us to follow a character when we don't know his goal is just going to get frustrating and annoying. One life is wiped out and three more are changed forever: the young man whose finger was on the trigger; an ageing gangster planning a deadly revenge, and the pregnant woman who struggles desperately to uncover the truth. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.

Two girls have been abducted, and the man arrested is married to Helen's childhood best friend, Linda.