Rabbit Hole

Critics Review

• A gripping, twisting murder mystery and a blackly comic indictment of the way we treat psychological illness today. At the very least it should reach the shortlist of this year’s Booker prize.

  The Times

• Follow Alice – plucky, resourceful, lovable and infuriating – down the Rabbit Hole in Billingham’s fast-paced and twisting thriller

  Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

• Rabbit Hole is the most cunning, complex, claustrophobic mystery with delicious echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I tore through it, terrified I’d never get out

  Louise Candlish, author of Our House

• Rabbit Hole is authentic, raucous and deeply compassionate. Expertly balancing humour, tension and pathos, it’ll do for the psychiatric ward what The Thursday Murder Club has done for retirement villages. A deeply compelling read

  Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange

• A gripping murder mystery with a streak of black humour

  Sunday Times (Books of the Year 2021)

• Mark Billingham’s tough, funny novel combines a shockingly twisty plot with a scathing critique of our mental health services

  Daily Mail

• I was totally drawn into Rabbit Hole by Alice, the novel’s wildly unreliable narrator. Hilarious, menacing yet vulnerable, she’s a brilliant creation, alive on the page. Billingham creates the dark, claustrophobic world of the psychiatric ward with both immense skill and heart

  Eve Chase, author of The Glass House

• Brilliant, suspenseful, poignant, heartbreaking, surprisingly funny, and Mark Billingham, magician that he is, pulls that proverbial rabbit out of the hat at the end. More than just about any other book I’ve read, I HAD to know how it would all come together

  Linwood Barclay

• Unusual and ambitious – written with immense sympathy, but also glorious jet-black humour

  Daily Express

• A one-of-a-kind narrative and a finale that resolves most matters but preserves a measure of tantalizing ambiguity

  Wall Street Journal

• 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

• An absolute monster of a read, it pulls you in close for a hug as it slaps your awareness. A LoveReading Star Book and Book of the Month, Rabbit Hole is quite simply an outstanding and wondrous ride.

  LoveReading (book of the month)

• When the solution comes it’s perfectly satisfying. My guess, though, is that what most readers will remember more intensely is . . . Alice’s voice: by turns funny, broken, chatty, defiant, bewildered-but always utterly convincing and compelling.

  Readers Digest

• It’s all gripping stuff

  Toronto Star

• With a powerful shocker that you never see coming, it is thought-provoking to discover what truly lies beneath

  The Mystery Site

• Mark Billingham’s Rabbit Hole is a terrific mystery and a gripping whodunit and whydunit – and especially howdunit

  Winnipeg Free Press