In The Dark

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Hoping to climb the ranks in a local gang and egged on by his friends, 17-year-old Theo Shirley fires a gun into a woman's car on a rainy night. There's Helen, a courageous pregnant woman driven to uncover the truth about the man who she thought she knew very well.

For a while, the story read a lot like the film Kidulthood, seeming to be mostly about life with the gang and following them. The police’s main suspect turns out to be the husband of an old childhood friend, although it soon becomes clear to Weeks that the man is innocent. This treatment clearly still rankles with the author, who adds: "The Sky thing will always be a niggle with me because Thorne is my main guy and I have written 14 books with him. Sometimes such a move can look contrived or desperate – but done right, it can be a shockingly effective plot development that leaves an audience stunned (think Ned Stark in series one of Game of Thrones or Jimmy Darmody in series two of Boardwalk Empire). 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.

A SHOCKING TWIST In a city where teenage gangs clash with career criminals and where loyalty is paid for in blood, anything is possible. Joining her on her trip back home is her partner and fellow DI Paul Hopwood (Ben Batt), an altogether more chipper, but similarly no-nonsense copper type. Things are, naturally, not exactly what they appear to be in the town of Polsford and there are soon plenty of suspicious characters coming out of the woodwork in true Broadchurch style. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file.

She says what she thinks, uses her pregnancy to get what she wants and as a very welcome excuse to do things she otherwise would be criticized for. And that's fine, because this is a far more rewarding and subtle book than all the blaring about 'Shocking Twists!

That said, this was a pretty good read because there were lots of twists and turns, enough to keep the story moving. Some street dialect, some very bloody scenes, a blunt tone and a language you don´t want your kids to speak. Two girls have been abducted, and the man arrested is married to Helen's childhood best friend, Linda. It’s a bold move killing off a major character so unexpectedly just ten minutes into a programme during the middle of its run.

S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Shots are fired at a car one rainy London night, and it swerves onto the pavement, killing a man at a bus stop. There were also a couple of points where I had to check back for the exact role of some of the minor characters, as they were mostly sketched over and tended to blend into the background until they were needed to add to the story - a little like the chorus in a Shakespearean play. But being tied up lying on that hotel room floor it was scary, which definitely fed into my first two books. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.And if you like your tales tied up at least semi-neatly, you'll twitch at this one – it's the kind of ending where you wonder whether the publisher forgot to print the last few pages. 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. Just weeks from giving birth, how will she survive in a world where death is an occupational hazard? This does make it quite difficult to know exactly where sympathies should lie as a reader, especially as there is no good and bad here, just different levels of bad. It's a cheap ploy and it's pulled off like an amateur who's just written a crime novel because "it's easy".