Rabbit Hole: The new masterpiece from the Sunday Times number one bestseller

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A fantastic thriller, combining a gripping plot and lead characters of remarkable depth…Readers who grab this one but aren’t familiar with its predecessors will be seeking them out. A series to savor.”— Booklist (starred review), on Their Little Secret I think I should be handcuffed after reading Rabbit Hole. I am guilty of loving this novel so much. I’m guilty of disliking character after character so much. I was an ex mental health worker am deliriously pleased with an accurate account of just how complex PTSD can be. Not long after her arrival in the ward one of the patients is found murdered. It is from here that things become extremely tangled and our viewpoint within Alice’s brain becomes heightened with delusions, fragmented memories, and deep-seated pain. I got it because my wife in 1970s was on psyc ward it's Sucide is painful it brings on meany changes but so does Murders

There are some good characters but I was never completely hooked and never really felt the authors usual magic. A decent read but not his best.It had been a while since I read a Mark Billingham novel. I read lots of the Tom Thorne books but then got out of sequence and never returned to them. Alice Armitage is a police officer living in a secure psychiatric hospital. She has been sectioned following a major breakdown caused by the traumatic death of a colleague that she feels responsible for. While she is in hospital a patient is murdered and Alice takes it upon herself to investigate. The story is narrated by Alice who describes her thoughts, ideas and memories throughout. It is during the telling of the story that we discover how unwell Alice is. She is paranoid and delusional, suffers with memory lapses and has huge mood swings. It soon becomes clear that nothing Alice describes can be taken as fact as so many of her memories and experiences are affected by her illness. Is she actually a Police Officer or could she have committed the murder herself even? What I would have liked to read, based on the synopsys: a complex, realistic depiction of life and (unnatural) death on a mental health ward, driven by complex, well-rounded characters and suffused with atmosphere, with maybe some sarcasm, darkness and/or social commentary thrown into the mix. The rabbit hole this Alice goes down is the local psych ward and I can't think of a better place to feature an unreliable narrator. How Alice come to be here we find out as the story progresses and we also meet the other patients on the ward as well as the nurses. These characters grew on me, some more than others, as we find out their particular stories. For Alice, called Al, she soon becomes embroiled in an investigation taking place on the ward. When a patient is found murdered, she becomes frustrated that she is not allowed to use her police skills and the detectives are not taking her seriously. Despite the suffering that goes on in the ward we witness so many strange and hilarious antics both before and after the murder of the patient but then a couple of weeks later a nurse is murdered....

Billingham’s picture of the ward and its staff is full of humanity, leaving us with a clear sense that this kind of illness could affect any of us, and the story offers an excellent twist. He gets better and better.”— Literary Review Mental patients are sometimes fascinating to read about, and Alice Armitage is one of them. She is a police officer, was a police officer, or imagines she was. She is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward after a mental breakdown. When one of the patients in the ward is murdered, Alice decides she is the perfect person to solve the crime since she has so much experience in investigations. She has identified the prime suspect, even though the police are ignoring her, but then the prime suspect is murdered as well. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Grove Atlantic for an e-copy of this book. This was released August 2021. I am providing my honest review. Overall, I guess this won’t be everyone’s cuppa but I think it’s extremely good. There’s a well balanced mix of humour combined with the state of a persons mind and a crime. It flows well considering the narrators condition and kudos to the author for that.They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But now one of their number is found murdered, and the accusations begin to fly. When one of her fellow patients is murdered, Alice becomes convinced that she has identified the killer and that she can catch them. Ignored by the police, she begins her own investigation. But when her prime suspect becomes the second victim, Alice’s life begins to unravel still further as she realises that she cannot trust anyone, least of all herself. Rabbit Hole is a mind-bending psychological thriller that puts protagonist Alice Armitage through the toughest investigation of her life. Billingham plays the unreliable narrator card brilliantly here, as we never really know the truth about what’s going on, leading to an electrifying conclusion. Alice is a complicated and intriguing protagonist, and Billingham’s portrayal of her PTSD is realistic yet sensitively handled. Her state of mind is always in a constant state of dismay, so everything she says or does has to be taken with a grain of salt. Considering that the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s original Alice have been interpreted (in the 1960s, at least) as the fantasies of someone who has ingested a surfeit of magic mushrooms, this isn’t so much a psychological thriller as a psychedelic one. With the Alice here as narrator, we often get the feeling that reality is just beyond our grasp. Genres: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural, Women Sleuths, Thrillers, Crime, Psychological, General, Suspense

Mark is also a regular contributor to radio and TV and is a member of the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a combo of bestselling crime and thriller writers who performed at the Glastonbury Festival in 2019. Superb . . . Billingham adds tantalizing red herrings throughout. The book’s masterly ending features a heart-stopping chase to apprehend Kieron’s surprising kidnapper. Established fans and newcomers alike will be thrilled.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Cry Baby Alice Armitage is a police officer. Or she was. Or perhaps she just imagines she was. Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. On the front of the book there is encouragement for readers to consider if Alice is "Police, Patient or Killer" and it is not until the end that this is explained.They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But now one of their number is murdered and the accusations begin to fly. The book took me a long time to read which is never a good sign. Alice was hard to engage with although I did care what happened to her and was curious about how the book would end. Winner of this month’s contest for Most Unreliable Narrator (sorry, no prize) is Alice “Al” Armitage, who woozily guides readers down Rabbit Hole, a novel of suspense by English author Mark Billingham . . . a one-of-a-kind narrative and a finale that resolves most matters but preserves a measure of tantalizing ambiguity.”— Wall Street Journal Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. Out of nowhere, there's some clunky Q&A-type dialogue thrown in regarding how the mentally ill are people too and what it's like to be afflicted, which I found pretty heavy-handed and lip service-y as well as structurally redundant, as it was the author's job to let us live inside the head of one such person -- I get that writing a coherent, structured novel from the perspective of a character who can trust neither her thoughts nor her recollection nor her perceptions is basically the toughest job imaginable, but, well, you know, if you take it on, you take it on, right? I could have done without that Deep Conversation with the café lady, as well as the cringe-inducing messaging between Alice and her former flatmate that added nothing to the narrative except a little padding (strings of emojis, anyone? I think I already used the word "juvenile", so I won't bring it up again).