The Last Temptation

I'm loving Val McDermid and am steadily working my way through this series. Her writing is excellent, her characters real and (in some cases) terrifying. Her plots are tight and the pacing is perfect.

May I begin by tempering this review with the information that this is the first Val McDermid book that I have read; consequently,my views may need a little more work.
At 530 pages, this is a big crime story but, it flows well and I never got that awful 'only three hundred pages to go' feeling. The book uses the three, or even four, different stories running side by side technique with each chapter split into three sub sections. I am not a great fan of this style but, MacDermid does it better than most and, after a few chapters, I settled into the book's rhythm.
Characters are sketchily drawn and even the main storyline of a police lookalike for a master criminals dead girlfriend is hardly new but the tale rattles along at just the right show more pace to make these defects insignificant. This would be a cracking book to take upon a long flight: hours would pass seemingly in the blink of an eye whilst engrossed in the story.
My main criticism of this work is one that I would aim at the entire genre of crime fiction: namely, the need to continually 'up the crime'. Sherlock Holmes could chase a jewel thief, Hercules Poirot needed a murder but only one and with very few details of the body. Taggart, Daziel and Pascoe et al use multiple deaths but still of the clean variety. Then, along comes the Messiah TV programmes and the murders become gory and now every crime book and film tries to outdo its rivals for sickening violence. The culmination of this book, The Last Temptation, involves the brutal rape of our heroine, DCI Carol Jordan. I am not convinced that, in a book which is essentially entertainment, that this is necessary but, even leaving that aside, the manner in which this was relegated to an unfortunate occurrence within a dozen pages seemed even more gratuitous. show less

Dr Tony Hill chases a twisted killer of Psychologists across Europe who uses barges and rivers to access his victims.
DCI Carol Gordon who looks like a gang leaders dead girlfriend goes under cover to bring him down.
It's a well thought out plot, convincing narrative and plausible ending.
The reader can the tension and personal upheaval detectives experience when on serious cases.
The two still don't get together.

A decent page-turner focusing on two elements: the legacy of Nazi medical experimentation and a complex undercover assignment in Berlin that leads to the tracking of a major criminal empire, and its suave, capable, and sadistic leader. Readers are introduced to a disturbed killer who is bumping off experimental psychologists. The book is intelligent, and also discusses the cracks in Europe's police capabilities when a single criminal commits crimes in more than one country. Also: do the ends justify the disturbing means? For this reader, the only weak element was the Epilogue, which ostensibly tied a few loose plot elements together. It was unnecessary and uneffective, and didn't match the quality of the 99% of the book preceeding it.

This dark and twisted thriller is not an easy read. Two in-depth plot lines play out side by side, both of which are good and would perhaps be better written as two separate books. The subplot is as involved as the main plot and, at times, the switch between them is jarring for the reader.

In one of the plots, Chief Inspector Carol Jordan undertakes a dangerous covert mission to bring down a European crime boss known for trafficking drugs and illegal immigrants. The fact she bears such a striking resemblance to someone in his past and hopes to use it to her advantage without her true motives being detected is a bit of a stretch at this level of criminal operation.

In another plot, a psychotic serial killer is targeting professionals for show more reasons that tie back to his ancestry. Though this is a work of fiction, some of the most appalling historical facts are embedded within the story.

Criminal profiler, Dr. Tony Hill, is the link between the two plot lines. Tony and Carol are drawn together from the beginning of the book and their separate cases are intertwined all the way to the end. The duo's undoing is also questionable and a little disappointing, given the depth of intelligence and strength the author has assigned to each character.

There are a lot of characters, a few of whom appear unnecessary as the plots advance. However, the writing is strong and the book is sufficiently interesting to make it to the end, though two individual attempts were required to get through it. The main characters are not easily likable, and the combination of two strong and separate plot lines resulted in an awkward and somewhat flat ending. show less

I've listened to a couple of the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books now. This one was a bit different form the previous ones, with Carol set on an undercover mission in Germany. The books flow well and I really like the characters which McDermid creates are well rounded and imperfectly believable. The story wasn't the best of the series, with a harrowing finale leaving the main characters in a bad state.

The killer’s grandfather was sent to one masquerading as a psychiatric rehabilitation/treatment hospital. Really it was an excuse for some twisted people to perform psychological experiments (torture) on the less fortunate or retarded. At the end of the war, the places were covered up and the perpetrators were never punished. What this did to the grandfather was to make him unbelievably cruel and twisted in his own right. He abused his wife and drove her out. When his daughter got pregnant he kicked her out just after having the baby. He then raised this kid on his barge. No tolerance for human behavior at all – any weakness from being smaller or just plain being a child was met with torture. Any mistake from just being human or show more never being given a piece of information was met with torture. Instead of blaming his grandfather, the killer blamed the psychiatric community. He equated any experimental psychology with the events that took place in these Nazi hospitals and began his killing crusade. Because the killer’s own horrific childhood was detailed early in the book, I could never really see him as the bad guy. Sure, I wanted him stopped, but in the end when he shot himself rather than be taken in, I was sad that it had to end that way.

The secondary plot about Carol’s undercover work was interesting, but it was also transparent. It was pretty obvious that the British authorities had Radecki’s lover killed just because she looked like Carol. It was cruel and enraged Radecki when he found out. Also, her mistake that caused her undoing was obvious. She should have gone straight to her apartment, turned on some lights and moved around, then gone down to Tony’s apartment 2 floors down. When she didn’t appear there, the tail that Darko had on her was alerted and then when he noticed her in Tony’s apartment window – she was all done. I knew it as soon as she did it and I thought that she should have known better. But if she hadn’t blown her cover, we wouldn’t have had the horrible rape scene and the torture of Tony scene. Petra and Marijke (Mar-eye-ka) saved the day.

One thing that was unsettling was the fact that German and Dutch people used very English idioms and slang. show less