A nasty serial killer stalks a northern English city. The police bring in a criminal psychologist, Tony Hill, to help them find the baddie by providing a psychological profile. Some of the coppers are unconvinced that fancy academics can be of any use with proper police work. Will Hill manage to vindicate his methods, or will old fashioned policing do the job, or will the killer evade them all?
This is all quite nicely set up, with the clash of old and new policing styles framing a tense investigation, with the usual wrong turns, red herrings, grunt work and flashes of inspiration. The array of characters are familiar but not too stock: the pushy local journalist, the compromised police source, the instinct-first inspector, the ambitious young copper, the handy computer guy, etc. The tension does ratchet up, the plot beats are propulsive without being too contrived, the central protagonists are believably human. The psychology stuff is arguably a little too mumbo-jumbo, as Hill gets inside the mind of the killer through a sort of empathic role-play, but there’s not so much of it that it becomes tiresome. And McDermid has a real talent for making things very nasty without straying into torture porn.
However, there’s one really odd feature of the plotting that mars the whole book. There might be spoilers here. See, by this stage of the development of the crime novel, we all kind of know the rules. We’re not in the golden age of puzzlers, where clues are scattered along the way and the detective brings them together in a denouement. But we are expecting that, somehow, what happens at the end of the book will satisfyingly and somewhat surprisingly pull together what happened earlier, often bringing into prominence facts and events that were presented somewhat incidentally when introduced. So as readers, we’re on the lookout for those facts and events. Writers have the challenge of introducing them in a way that allows for surprise, fitting them into the book in a natural-ish way, such that their relevance only later becomes apparent.
Now, throughout this book, Tony is subject to dirty phone calls from a mysterious woman. He has no idea who this woman is, and we’re given to understand that these have been going on since before we met him, and they just sort of started happening. As the investigation unfurls, Tony is often interrupted in his rest by one of these calls, which he tolerates and somewhat enjoys as a therapeutic aid for his erectile problems. But they’re presented as totally unconnected to the matter at hand, and Tony exhibits no wish to think much about who this person is, or why they started ringing him.
Well, gee, huh. Do you think maybe there might actually be a connection? Do you think this woman might actually be –gasp! – the serial killer? And do you think this wouldn’t be so clangingly obvious if the otherwise curious, alert, clever protagonist made, like, some attempt to think through what all this mucky phone stuff was about?
The problem, essentially, is that in straining so keep the the phone calls apparently incidental, McDermid makes it apparent how artificial their place in the book is, and so makes it obvious that they’ll turn out to be very significant. And this in turn undermines a lot of the rest of the book, which is about how acutely Hill brings his smarts to bear on profiling the man who’s knocking off unfortunates. I don’t think this is deliberate undermining, designed to ironically show the limitations of the methods. The methods do, in the end, triumph. I think it’s just a really clumsy bit of plotting that somewhat spoils an otherwise very decent read.