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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find... He's handsome and talented, rich and famous - a notorious charmer with the power to seduce...and the will to destroy. No one can fathom what he's about to do next. show more Until one of Hill's students is murdered. Now, of all the killers Hill and Jordan have hunted, none has been so ruthless, so terrifyingly clever, and so brilliantly elusive as the killer who's hunting them... show lessTags
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Doing a slow re-read of the series alternating with the newer ones, I enjoyed this more than I expected. My memory was of not liking this at all however many years ago, and I'm not entirely sure why. The fate of Shaz Bowman disturbed me at the time (and not in the way it was supposed to) but being ready for it this time helped. The ending is a bit too open, particularly as the suggested payoff takes until four books later for it to occur. I remember dreading that suggested immediate follow-up so I suppose this time around I knew it wasn't going to happen and that gave me more of a sense of closure, however temporary.
I am a bit late to the Val McDermid party but have been a fan of the tv series. It's interesting to note that the tv series departs significantly from the books in terms of storylines but not from character - Hermione Norris' Carol Jordan and Robson Green's Tony Hill are very close to the written characters.
This is the second in the series. After the disastrous dénoument of [b:The Mermaids Singing|459386|The Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #1)|Val McDermid|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389270695s/459386.jpg|88269] Carol Jordan has been promoted to DCI and relocated to East Yorkshire. She's inherited a squad who are resentful of her as an outsider, making it hard to get their buy-in on investigating what she believes is show more serial arson.
Meanwhile, Tony Hill has been given the go-ahead to create a National Profiling Taskforce. Sharing office space with the plods in Leeds (who are none too happy to have witch-doctors on their patch) he sets about training his baby profilers.
As an exercise, the trainees are assigned a series of missing persons cases, all involving young girls with a certain, shall we say, insouciant look. One super keen young profiler thinks she's found a real-life cluster of serial killer victims, and it all hits off from there. Carol gets drawn in as she seeks Tony's help profiling her arsonist, and is soon drawn in to his protegé's controversial theory.
No more because SPOILERS! show less
This is the second in the series. After the disastrous dénoument of [b:The Mermaids Singing|459386|The Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #1)|Val McDermid|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389270695s/459386.jpg|88269] Carol Jordan has been promoted to DCI and relocated to East Yorkshire. She's inherited a squad who are resentful of her as an outsider, making it hard to get their buy-in on investigating what she believes is show more serial arson.
Meanwhile, Tony Hill has been given the go-ahead to create a National Profiling Taskforce. Sharing office space with the plods in Leeds (who are none too happy to have witch-doctors on their patch) he sets about training his baby profilers.
As an exercise, the trainees are assigned a series of missing persons cases, all involving young girls with a certain, shall we say, insouciant look. One super keen young profiler thinks she's found a real-life cluster of serial killer victims, and it all hits off from there. Carol gets drawn in as she seeks Tony's help profiling her arsonist, and is soon drawn in to his protegé's controversial theory.
No more because SPOILERS! show less
From quite close to the beginning you know who dunnit, it's the trying to pin the crime on the perpetrator that's the story in this one. He's so completely immoral and cunning and I really did root for the good guys to succeed but could also see where they encountered pitfalls that really got in the way.
A celebrity is kidnapping young women but he's very clever and the evidence is scant, can Tony and Carol manage to find all the evidence to pin it on him, or will one of Tony's students get the blame for a fellow student's death?
Enjoyable, but pretty gruesome, I want to see the series now!
A celebrity is kidnapping young women but he's very clever and the evidence is scant, can Tony and Carol manage to find all the evidence to pin it on him, or will one of Tony's students get the blame for a fellow student's death?
Enjoyable, but pretty gruesome, I want to see the series now!
I'm still hooked. Tony's trying to deal with his experiences during his last case by training a profiling unit. The unit doesn't get a great reception, naturally, and things are made worse when one of Tony's students goes missing. It was only supposed to be an exercise after all, not a real case. There was no way she should have found a cluster and certainly no way there could have been a link between them. Different from the first because the reader knows who the killer is from the get-go and the tension comes from wondering if he'll be found out in time, and if indeed anyone will believe he is the killer. After all, his TV persona is so caring, and he's always doing all this charity work. It could never be him. TV would never lie to us.
A good crime thriller featuring McDermids excellent character: the criminal profiler Tony Hill. The plot is a good one with the suspect identified early on and then the thrust of the novel is how can a conviction be secured. There is a sub plot involving an arsonist that runs parallel with the main investigation that impacts on the central characters. However it is yet another story where Home office officers and police officers are forced to act outside of their command structures to get their man and this part of the story stretches credibility at times. I also thought that some of the secondary characters were "stock characters" like the successful tough lesbian police officer and the ignorant bigoted Yorkshire CID men.
A good show more thriller/detective story with some suspense and horror. show less
A good show more thriller/detective story with some suspense and horror. show less
A perfectly readable ainddeed quite gripping police procedural - though technically about Home Office profilers rather than police per se. It has a gallery of believable characters, and - though there is no mystery, the identity of the killer is revealed at the beginning - it does keep you wanting to know what will happen next.
Given that it is all revealed early on, there is no harm in my writing that the villain is a show business personality with certain parellels to Jimmy Saville. I read the book just before the Saville revelations and I thought this a bit odd even then before the stories came out.
One now wonders if McDermid - one time tabloid eporter - was not producing some kind of roman-a-clef
(Of course non-one has yet said that show more Saville killed anybody.). show less
Given that it is all revealed early on, there is no harm in my writing that the villain is a show business personality with certain parellels to Jimmy Saville. I read the book just before the Saville revelations and I thought this a bit odd even then before the stories came out.
One now wonders if McDermid - one time tabloid eporter - was not producing some kind of roman-a-clef
(Of course non-one has yet said that show more Saville killed anybody.). show less
It’s No. 2 in the series with DCI Carol Jordan the psychologist Dr. Tony Hill. I love reading Val McDermid for pleasure, on holidays, etc. Her books are always page turners. Only after having read so many of her books did I notice the trend: She often has a very ambitious, tough female officer you are supposed to like and root for. She investigates by herself and gets herself into a seriously dangerous position only to be killed off really early into the story. Despite discovering this patter, I still enjoyed the story. I also noticed a more flowery prose in the beginning than I’m used to and like in her later books. Other than that the usual, solid serial killer thriller.
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Author Information
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Val McDermid was born in Scotland on June 4, 1955. She was the first student from a state school in Scotland accepted to read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She graduated in 1975 and became a journalist. She wrote her first novel at the age of 21. It didn't get published, but she turned it into a play entitled Like a Happy Ending. It was show more performed by the Plymouth Theatre Company and was later adapted for BBC radio. Her first book, Report for Murder, was published in 1987. She is the author of the Lindsay Gordon Mystery series, the Kate Brannigan Mystery series, and the Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Mysteries series as well as several stand alone books including The Distant Echo, A Darker Domain, Trick of the Dark and Out of Bounds. The Mermaids Singing won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Knaur Taschenbuch (62428)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Het profiel
- Original title
- The Wire in the Blood
- Original publication date
- 1997
- People/Characters
- Tony Hill; Carol Jordan; Jacko Vance; Shaz Bowman
- Important places
- Bradfield, England, UK; London, England, UK
- Related movies
- Wire in the Blood (2002 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.T.S. Eliot - Dedication
- Julia, Lisanne and Brigid
With love - First words
- Murder was like magic, he thought. (Prologue)
Tony Hill lay in bed and watched a long strip of cloud slide across a sky the colour of duck eggs. - Quotations*
- You watch helplessly as your hot leads turn out colder than a junkie's heart.
"Still think she's shaggable, Lee?" Di Earnshaw's thin mouth pursed. "Not unless you like singing falsetto." - "I don't think you'd feel a lot like singing," Lee said. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Vance could hardly wait.
- Blurbers
- Rendell, Ruth; Rankin, Ian; Dexter, Colin
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine with the TV series videos; different works.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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