The Mermaids Singing
A Novel
-
-
4.2 • 38 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Val McDermid stunned readers and critics alike with the publication of her brilliant thriller A Place of Execution, which won the Anthony, McCavity, and the Los Angeles Times awards. Now in The Mermaids Singing, she continues her trademark ingenuity for suspense, and introduces criminal profiler Tony Hill who has spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But now he's become one of the hunted...
This was the summer he discovered what he wanted -- at a gruesome museum of criminology far off the beaten track of more timid tourists. Visions of torture inspired his fantasies like a muse. It would prove so terribly fulfilling.
The bodies of four men have been discovered in the town of Bradfield. Enlisted to investigate is criminal psychologist Tony Hill. Even for a seasoned professional, the series of mutilation sex murders is unlike anything he's encountered before. But profiling the psychopath is not beyond him. Hill's own past has made him the perfect man to comprehend the killer's motives. It's also made him the perfect victim.
A game has begun for the hunter and the hunted. But as Hill confronts his own hidden demons, he must also come face to face with an evil so profound he may not have the courage -- or the power -- to stop it...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McDermid (A Clean Break) enters new ground with a dark tale that is more complex, more carefully crafted and far more disturbing than her Kate Brannigan mysteries. By the time the police admit that Bradfield, a fictional city in northern England, has a serial killer, four men are already dead, each tortured in a different way and then abandoned outdoors in town. Baffled by a lack of physical evidence left by the meticulous sociopath, police bring in Tony Hill, a Home Office forensic psychologist who profiles criminals. Tony, who begins each day by ``selecting a persona,'' devours crime data with a fascination approaching admiration for the killer. The interest distracts him from obsessing over his own sexual impotence and over the ``exquisite torture'' of salacious phone calls he's been getting from a strange woman. DI Carol Jordan, a mercifully normal person who is Tony's liaison with the force, quickly grasps the profiling approach while keeping her policing instincts. Carol and Tony forge an uneasy relationship; but, as they pursue ``the Queer Killer,'' a cloddish policeman undermines them, a local reporter blows the case to get a byline and the murderer closes in on a new quarry. A warning: woven into this powerful story are journal entries in which the murder discusses torture in loving detail, an aspect that makes this graphic, psychologically terrifying tale almost as off-putting as it is impossible to put down. FYI: This novel won Britain's Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of 1995.
