Morbid? Certainly: Their Little Secret by Mark Billingham

Many thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to review this text prior to general release.
This is the 16th Billingham novel starring his Detective Inspector Tom Thorne as the main character. Billingham is one of the school of British crime writers who began to flourish at the beginning of this new century which also includes another favourite author Mo Hyder, .worthy successors to the likes of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. They all have in common their exploration of the sordid, grubby underbelly of British life, and their heroes are jobbing, fragile and challenged police officers with more than a few stresses and tensions of their own, 
I was lucky to read Billingham's first Tom Thorne novel "Sleepy Head", when it first came out, and "Their Little Secret" shares with that an imaginative and grotesque central conceit which acts as the main catalyst for the crime under investigation. This is written in typical Billingham style with the first person alternating between Thorne and the main antagonist, The plot is both convoluted and ingenious, starting out apparently as one thing and becoming another, the reader, like Thorne, is misled more than once. 
The characters are generally well portrayed though I cannot help but think that Thorne's entourage, including as it does two gay characters, is somewhat stereotypical and perhaps it was because of this or perhaps because I hadn't read the immediately preceding novels, I found the parts of the story that dealt with the different tensions between them to be the less engaging sections of the narrative.
If you like your crime imaginative and intriguing and are not put off by an exploration of human weakness, Billingham is certainly your guy.