Review: Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories, by Mark Billingham

As a fan of Mark Billingham’s crime novels featuring Tom Thorne, I had high hopes for this very short collection of three stories. I was not disappointed. All three are good, and at least one is set in a universe familiar to the Thorne novels — with one of the regular characters from that universe making a cameo appearance. That story is also set in my neighborhood, and like the most recent Thorne novel, Highgate Woods plays a central role in the story. This is a book that can be read in under an hour, and I highly recommend it.