What the Night Brings
- Authors: Mark Billingham
- Series: Book 19 in the Tom Thorne series
- Type: Novel
- Genres: Mystery
- Rank:
- Rating: 4.6 based on 2,207 reviews
- Release Date: July 8, 2025
- Print length: 432 pages (Hardcover)
About the book
What the Night Brings by Mark Billingham is the latest mystery in the bestselling Tom Thorne series, and this time, a killer is targeting the police. Is it payback? And is it justified?
'Three dead coppers, Tom, maybe four by lunchtime...'
The targeted murder of four officers is only the first in a series of attacks that leaves police scared, angry and, most disturbingly of all, vengeful.
As Tom Thorne and Nicola Tanner dig into the reasons for the violence, a deeper darkness begins to emerge: the possibility that these murders are payback. The price paid for an unspeakable betrayal.
To uncover the truth, Thorne will be forced to question everything he stands for. He can trust nobody, and the shocking secrets revealed by one terrible night will fracture his entire world.
Praise for What the Night Brings
If you prefer your police procedurals spiked with an extra-dry dash of bitters, Mark Billingham is your man. Over the course of 18 books, the aptly named Detective Inspector Tom Thorne has become the English writer’s Harry Bosch. Billingham briefly stepped away from the popular character, but now Thorne is back in an explosive mystery-within-a-mystery... The revelations that end the book are genuinely upsetting, leaving major unfinished business on the table and readers wanting more.
Incandescent with its brilliant plotting and much needed doses of gallows humor, the story proceeds with considerable speed to a staggering ending that may not be the one readers will be expecting.
Detective Inspector Tom Thorne returns for the 19th installment of Mark Billingham’s critically acclaimed suspense series... Do not under any circumstances peek at the ending... Joy, along with its antithesis, heartbreak, should never be foreshadowed.
Even though the guilty party behind the website and the majority of the killings is revealed fairly early in the book, I will not disclose those details here. That information, as well as a number of jaw-dropping revelations, really makes What the Night Brings a special novel. It is so good and hyper-realistic that longtime readers naturally will be concerned about how Thorne and his team handle whatever the fallout and end result is surrounding a case where there truly are no winners. Either way, it makes for some terrific storytelling and a novel you will not soon forget.
The more attached you are to this standout franchise, the harder its final revelations will hit you.
Mark Billingham is still showing up with his A game... another hard-charging, no-mercy police procedural... written with verve, plotted with ingenuity, and spiked with the author's signature relief-valve humor... the ultra-dark, ultra-good 19th thriller in the DI Tom Thorne series.
London police detective Tom Thorne and his colleagues - including the irreverent and ever-entertaining pathologist, Phil Hendricks - race against the clock to pursue a deadly, highly focused criminal who appears to be targeting police officers, possibly as acts of terrifying revenge.
About the author
