Thursday, June 16, 2016

"Die Of Shame"

Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel and also won the Sherlock Award for the best detective created by a British writer. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages and were made into a hit TV series starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne.

Billingham applied the Page 69 Test to his new stand-alone novel, Die of Shame, and reported the following:
Simply put, page 69 of Die Of Shame is very untypical of the book as a whole. The novel centres around a group of recovering addicts and their weekly meetings with therapist Tony De Silva and this page happens to be one of four in the book which are transcripts of Tony’s notes, recapping the sessions which we have seen in the preceding chapter. These sections – always one page long – are nevertheless hugely important in that the reader gets to see what Tony really thinks of what his clients have been saying and doing in the sessions. He strongly believes that shame is at the heart of many of his clients’ problems with addiction and in these sections we see how this particular brand of therapy is yielding results. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to realise that Tony has unwittingly lifted the lid on a very disturbing Pandora’s box and that something has been revealed that is shameful enough to cost somebody their life…
Learn more about the book and author at Mark Billingham's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bones Beneath.

--Marshal Zeringue