From the Dead

At the outset of Billingham’s engrossing ninth novel featuring Det. Insp. Tom Thorne (after 2011’s Bloodline), an unnamed man stages his own death, allowing him to escape from England; his former wife is convicted of conspiring to murder him. Ten years later, that wife, Donna Langford, is out of prison, insisting on her innocence, a claim bolstered by her having recently received a photo showing her husband, Alan Langford, in a place that looks like Spain, apparently “back from the dead.” Donna engages Anna Carpenter, an inexperienced and ill-equipped PI, who turns for help to Thorne, though the London cop happens to be consumed by the trial of a man accused of murdering an 18-year-old girl whose body was never found. While the incessant banter between Thorne and his colleagues can be distracting and the murder trial gets somewhat lost in the shuffle, a chillingly clever criminal boosts this intelligent procedural. Agent: Anna Steadman, Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency (U.K.). (Jan.)