Absolution
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
"Highly literate and entirely engrossing. One of the year's best literary thrillers."—The Washington Post
It's twenty years since police detective Alan McAlpine has set foot in Patrickhill Station—and more than twenty years since he fell forever in love with the mute, faceless woman he called Anna as she lay dying in Glasgow's Western Infirmary. Daily he'd watched over her, and they had begun to communicate with each other, she by moving her wounded fingers. Her fingers could not tell the sad, unseasoned police cadet her name, however, or name for him the father of her newborn baby girl or identify the assailants who had flung the acid in her once incomparably beautiful face. Or tell him how she'd smuggled a cache of uncut diamonds into Scotland.
Now McAlpine is back in Patrickhill, where he's been summoned to head up the investigation of a disturbing murder case. Two women—their arms outstretched, their legs together and feet crossed at the ankle—have already died at the hands of a man the press has tagged the Crucifixion Killer.
With crimes in the present continually detouring both McAlpine and the elusive killer he pursues into an unredeemed past, the mystery in this steely, piercing psychological thriller is as gripping as its twists are surprising. And absolution proves to be extreme.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish author Ramsay's atmospheric and melancholic novel is a solid but unremarkable debut. Deeply flawed Glaswegian police constable Alan McAlpine is obsessed with an unsolved case more than two decades old, involving an acid attack on a young pregnant woman who committed suicide shortly after giving birth. As McAlpine investigates a bizarre series of "Crucifixion" murders, in which all the victims have been disemboweled and laid out with arms spread and feet crossed at the ankle, he begins to suspect that this killer is somehow tied to the mystery of his "blonde angel." The pacing is sluggish, but Ramsay manages to paint a vivid picture of rain-lashed Glasgow. The stark late autumn landscape is a fitting backdrop to the brutal murders as well as McAlpine's dark epiphanies. Ramsay has tremendous potential, but there needs to be more to McAlpine than formulaic angst if he's to succeed as a series protagonist.
