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The Wire In The Blood by Val McDermid
The Blurb On The Back:
Young girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind.
Nobody gets inside the messy heads of serial killers like Dr Tony Hill. Now heading up a National Profiling Task Force, he sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of missing teenagers and asked to discover whether there is a sinister link between any of the cases. Only one officer comes up with a concrete theory - a theory that is ridiculed by the group ... until one of their number is murdered and mutiliated.
For Tony HIll, the murder becomes a matter of personal revenge, and, joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks on a campaign of psychological terrorism - a game where hunter and hunted can be all too easily reversed.
This book is the immediate sequel to The Mermaids Singing but I didn't find a copy until after I'd already read the fourth book in what's become known as The Wire In The Blood Series (The Torment of Others). I'm actually very glad that I read them out of order because whilst I'd enjoyed much of The Mermaids Singing, had I read The Wire In The Blood immediately afterwards, I think I'd have given up on it.
Firstly, as I said in my review for The Mermaids Singing, one of the things that I was hoping would be developed further was the aftereffects of Tony HIll's close encounter with a serial killer. For someone like McDermid who has a real skill at getting inside complex personalities, this should have been a layered examination but it isn't. We get a few mentions of Hill ocassionally slowing or stopping mid-conversation or lecture as his terrible memories re-surface and we're told how he struggles to keep his temper knowing that there are some people who know all the details, but we're never shown the effects and when those moments of memory do come, they feel very cursory - as though they're there to remind us that there was a previous book rather than to give us any insight into Hill as a character.
Secondly, McDermid keeps ramming down the reader's throat the idea that there's some great connection and sexual tension between Hill and Jordan that they can't act upon because Hill's psychologically fucked up and impotent. It was something that I didn't enjoy in The Mermaids Singing and I really didn't enjoy it in this book. The fact is, the only reason the reader knows that there's tension is because McDermid keeps telling us that there is. The 'tension' feels fake and at times a little too Mills and Boon to be believable. I also think that there's a danger through its use of making both characters a reverse gender cliche - Hill is too emotionally damaged to summon the courage to act on his attraction and Jordan is too uncertain of whether she wants to ruin the friendship to act upon it.
The third reason is a structural one. McDermid uses the brave device of telling us right from the start who the killer is - a popular family tv presenter called Jacko Vance. She shows us how he commits his crimes and how he's managed to get away with it for so long, trusting that the credibility of Vance's character and the tension of how firstly Shaz Bowman and later Hill fits the pieces together will pull the reader through the plot. It's a testament to McDermid's writing skills that this gets to be 50% successful but the fact is that there's a huge credibility problem with Vance's character in that it is simply not believable that the tabloid press wouldn't have an inkling of his marriage of convenience to a lesbian fellow tv presenter and it is also highly unlikely that he'd be able to move around so freely without ever having had so much as one paparazzi following him. McDermid really lost me when Vance killed Bowman - it's contrived and telegraphed almost from the moment Bowman first appears on the page (not least because of the indiscreet Blurb on the Back, which really gives the game away and robs it of any tension it might have). It's also a stupid killing - we're told that Vance knows that Bowman's flying solo and we're also shown how he's been getting rid of bodies, making it virtually impossible to forensically catch him. For someone who's clearly so controlled, the seemingly ad hoc murder of a policeman is a messy device to move the plot and I feel it would have had more credibility if we're shown Vance having got background information on Bowman before using it to kill her. The fact that he's the last person to see her alive would automatically raise questions even in the mind of the West Yorkshire Police (who are made to seem ignorant and belligerant purely for plot purposes).
McDermid also uses a two-strand plot to the book - having moved Jordan to take a DCI role in an East Yorkshire town, she's given a serial arsonist to investigate. It's a perfunctory plot that's there to give her an excuse to try and profile the offender, thereby giving McDermid an excuse to have her hook up again with Hill. The problem is that there's no commitment to the arsonist storyline so it feels too much like filler. If the idea was to write a book that gives us a perspective on serial killers from two perspectives, then that's the story she should have stuck to.
The Verdict:
Whilst not without ambition, this is a disappointing book because McDermid stretches credibility a little too thinly, the will-they-won't-they thing between Hill and Jordan lacks the spark to be interesting and there's just too much sign-posting going on for the tension to kick in. Not one that I'd particularly recommend, unless you really want to see where The Wire In The Blood Series is going.
Young girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind.
Nobody gets inside the messy heads of serial killers like Dr Tony Hill. Now heading up a National Profiling Task Force, he sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of missing teenagers and asked to discover whether there is a sinister link between any of the cases. Only one officer comes up with a concrete theory - a theory that is ridiculed by the group ... until one of their number is murdered and mutiliated.
For Tony HIll, the murder becomes a matter of personal revenge, and, joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks on a campaign of psychological terrorism - a game where hunter and hunted can be all too easily reversed.
This book is the immediate sequel to The Mermaids Singing but I didn't find a copy until after I'd already read the fourth book in what's become known as The Wire In The Blood Series (The Torment of Others). I'm actually very glad that I read them out of order because whilst I'd enjoyed much of The Mermaids Singing, had I read The Wire In The Blood immediately afterwards, I think I'd have given up on it.
Firstly, as I said in my review for The Mermaids Singing, one of the things that I was hoping would be developed further was the aftereffects of Tony HIll's close encounter with a serial killer. For someone like McDermid who has a real skill at getting inside complex personalities, this should have been a layered examination but it isn't. We get a few mentions of Hill ocassionally slowing or stopping mid-conversation or lecture as his terrible memories re-surface and we're told how he struggles to keep his temper knowing that there are some people who know all the details, but we're never shown the effects and when those moments of memory do come, they feel very cursory - as though they're there to remind us that there was a previous book rather than to give us any insight into Hill as a character.
Secondly, McDermid keeps ramming down the reader's throat the idea that there's some great connection and sexual tension between Hill and Jordan that they can't act upon because Hill's psychologically fucked up and impotent. It was something that I didn't enjoy in The Mermaids Singing and I really didn't enjoy it in this book. The fact is, the only reason the reader knows that there's tension is because McDermid keeps telling us that there is. The 'tension' feels fake and at times a little too Mills and Boon to be believable. I also think that there's a danger through its use of making both characters a reverse gender cliche - Hill is too emotionally damaged to summon the courage to act on his attraction and Jordan is too uncertain of whether she wants to ruin the friendship to act upon it.
The third reason is a structural one. McDermid uses the brave device of telling us right from the start who the killer is - a popular family tv presenter called Jacko Vance. She shows us how he commits his crimes and how he's managed to get away with it for so long, trusting that the credibility of Vance's character and the tension of how firstly Shaz Bowman and later Hill fits the pieces together will pull the reader through the plot. It's a testament to McDermid's writing skills that this gets to be 50% successful but the fact is that there's a huge credibility problem with Vance's character in that it is simply not believable that the tabloid press wouldn't have an inkling of his marriage of convenience to a lesbian fellow tv presenter and it is also highly unlikely that he'd be able to move around so freely without ever having had so much as one paparazzi following him. McDermid really lost me when Vance killed Bowman - it's contrived and telegraphed almost from the moment Bowman first appears on the page (not least because of the indiscreet Blurb on the Back, which really gives the game away and robs it of any tension it might have). It's also a stupid killing - we're told that Vance knows that Bowman's flying solo and we're also shown how he's been getting rid of bodies, making it virtually impossible to forensically catch him. For someone who's clearly so controlled, the seemingly ad hoc murder of a policeman is a messy device to move the plot and I feel it would have had more credibility if we're shown Vance having got background information on Bowman before using it to kill her. The fact that he's the last person to see her alive would automatically raise questions even in the mind of the West Yorkshire Police (who are made to seem ignorant and belligerant purely for plot purposes).
McDermid also uses a two-strand plot to the book - having moved Jordan to take a DCI role in an East Yorkshire town, she's given a serial arsonist to investigate. It's a perfunctory plot that's there to give her an excuse to try and profile the offender, thereby giving McDermid an excuse to have her hook up again with Hill. The problem is that there's no commitment to the arsonist storyline so it feels too much like filler. If the idea was to write a book that gives us a perspective on serial killers from two perspectives, then that's the story she should have stuck to.
The Verdict:
Whilst not without ambition, this is a disappointing book because McDermid stretches credibility a little too thinly, the will-they-won't-they thing between Hill and Jordan lacks the spark to be interesting and there's just too much sign-posting going on for the tension to kick in. Not one that I'd particularly recommend, unless you really want to see where The Wire In The Blood Series is going.