Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham: a review

If been in a bit of a reading slump at the minute. As much as anything, I’ve been making my way through one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Review for that coming soon with Bits Bobs and Books. It’s hard to enjoy reading anything else when your current read is incredibly draining. I went back to an author I hoped would be sure to drag me out of my slump. I opted for an audiobook as it meant I could listen at work. Separate myself from the place where the bad book is sitting.

            Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham follows Alice Armitage, a former police officer whose PTSD and psychotic breakdown lands her in the psych ward. When one of her fellow patients is killed, she’s sure she can solve the case. However, her prime suspect becomes another victim, and she begins to worry just how much she can trust herself, or anybody else around her.

            I want to open with saying this does not, to me at least, feel like mentally ill people being vilified for the sake of it. This is effectively a police case with an incredibly unreliable narrator. I really appreciate the way that Billingham covers mental health in this book. Effectively getting in the head of someone who cannot think in the way that someone who’s neurotypical can. She also feels incredibly real in the way that she reacts to being mentally ill. The humour she employs as a kind of coping mechanism is incredibly accurate, and shows how Billingham understands how to write humour about mentally ill people without laughing at them.

            I’m going to be spoiler free, but the way twists and revelations are handled in this book are done so well. They didn’t feel out of nowhere. It’s the sort of thing that, when you go back, you can spot all the little clues left behind leading you to the final conclusions. Speaking of which…

            Like I said, I am going to be spoiler free, so I’ll handle this carefully. The epilogue revelation was so good. I don’t want to be like oh yeah I figured that out right from the start. I had inklings at times that this might be the case, but it was nothing more than that. I never figured out just how it worked though because she did know a fair amount about how things work. The full revelation is so good, and I had to stop on my walk home so I could make sure I could take in every single detail.

            Once again, Mark Billingham has killed it. I’m sure I’ll be listening again in the future, and I have Cry Baby on my shelf knowing full well that I really need to read it. I 100% recommend this book. The audiobook is read incredibly well by Maxine Peake, and she embodied Alice in the most brilliant way. If you love crime fiction, you have to get your hands on this.