The Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid

When Home Office profiler Tony Hill puts together a new National Profiling Task Force, he knows the new members are going to need training, so as an exercise, he sets them the task of scrutinizing the disappearance of a group of girls to search for links between them. All of the girls are presumed runaways and no one really expects to find anything, but one member does come up with a connection, one which would set Britain on its head if it were found to be true. No one takes this link seriously, until the officer doesn’t show up for work one morning. Suddenly, the impossible looks like it might be all too true.

I was introduced to Val McDermid because I like mysteries, but I personally think her works qualify more as thrillers than mystery since they are more about finding and substantiating the path from A to B than following the trail from A to see where it leads them. You know where she’s taking the story, you just don’t know how she’ll get there. I also have to admit that she reaches the verge of my comfort zone. I’m a bit of a chicken and prefer a nice, comfortable murder to one where you have to enter the brain of a killer. I don’t care for reading or listening about torture and pain and frankly prefer murders which are quick and as painless as possible so we can get on to the whodunit part. I once listened to a book where there was at least an hour of torture and pain and I just can’t see the point of going into it until it almost becomes boring and you lose interest because the plot’s not going anywhere in the meantime. Fortunately for me, McDermid does keep the blood, gore and torture scenes to a very minimum and the plot was good with good characters. Rating this one for what it is, I’ll give it a 4 out of 5. Great for its genre, but not brilliant enough to really entice newbies into that genre.

A Place of Execution by Val McDermid

Ravelry has often been called an evil time suck (in a good way), and it is. It’s also evil in many other ways as well. The Audiobook Knitters group often comes up with new things for me to read. Recently I took a look at the Mystery thread and latched on to Val McDermid’s name. This turned out to be a good thing because now I have another whole series of books to read.

I started with A Place of Execution, the story of the missing Alison Carter who disappears one afternoon while walking her dog near her home. When blood and hairs are found in a copse near where her dog was found tied up, it seems as if they’re dealing with murder and not just a runaway or kidnapping. The young Inspector George Bennett is charged with finding Alison, dead or alive, and finding the person or persons responsible for any harm she may have come to. Unbeknownst to him at the time, this case would not only change, but it would shape the rest of his life as his drive and determination refuse to allow him to rest until the case is solved.

Although I found that the story occasionally noticeably slowed, which coincided with times when the investigation flagged as well, A Place of Execution is well written, with good characters and a brilliant sense of reality. McDermid paints a good picture with his words, especially of the inhabitants of Scardale. She does an excellent job at making them come to life both through description and actions. The reader gets a good sense of what it must be like to be miles into the back of beyond with the lonely countryside and its reticent inhabitants, also of how frustrating the whole investigation must have been for Bennett. She also leaves the mystery wide open, so although you see where it could go, you can never be quite sure.

The ending left me floored and certainly in no doubt of what my opinion was – rather ambiguous statement, but if you read the book, you’ll understand. I can recommend it to mystery lovers at any rate. A 5 out of 5 for this one. Brilliant mystery.