Alison Willets is unlucky to be alive. She has survived a deliberately induced stroke. She can hear, see, feel; she is completely aware of everything going on around her but she cannot move a muscle. In leaving her alive, the police believe a dangerous killer has made his first mistake.
Then DI Tom Thorne discovers the horrifying truth. It's the women already dead who are the mistakes. Death is this man's `appropriate margin of error', and he is keen to try again. Thorne must hunt down a killer whose agenda is terrifyingly unique and Alison Willets, the one person who holds the key to his identity, is unable to tell anybody...

Sleepyhead is not a conventional crime novel in terms of character or prose style. Billingham's influences as a writer are darkly American rather than cosily English. It is a sinister and sophisticated thriller that imposes a shocking and twisted new take on the contemporary British crime novel. Impeccably plotted and darkly compelling, Sleepyhead is essentially a story about obsession - the obsession of two men whose lives collide with fatal consequences. Their narrative is punctuated by the voice of a woman condemned to a life trapped inside her own body, but whose warped and often blackly humorous outlook give the book a unique tone.

Former secret service agent turned successful entrepreneur Kurt Ford thought he had suffered his share of tragedy when the wife he adored died, leaving him to raise their young son alone. But years later, his beloved son - who also became a secret service agent - turns up dead, and Ford is inconsolable. He refuses to accept the government's story that his son committed suicide and begins investigating the case as a murder. Ford soon learns from an old secret service friend that two other young agents have also recently met with unusual deaths, and he discovers a common link between these agents and his son: all three were involved in a cryptic meeting with the president. If this meeting proves to be the cause of his son's death, Ford will attempt to do what only four other men in history have been able to accomplish - he will kill the president of the United States.