Category Archives: Val McDermid

Review: A DARKER DOMAIN by Val McDermid

Posted on by
14

If the world could be ordered to my specific tastes all books would be available in audio format and all of those would be read by people with Scottish accents, even the ones set in outback Australia. I blame my mother’s crush on Sean Connery (and the fact a portion of my developmental years was spent in darkened theatres watching his movies instead of going to kindergarten) for the fact I find it the very best way to hear English spoken. I was pre-disposed then to liking A DARKER DOMAIN, one of Val McDermid’s standalone novels, given it is narrated by Scottish actress Eilidh Fraser. Happily the story is a damned fine one too which made my listening experience complete.

Being something of a latecomer to the Val McDermid appreciation society I was, once again, impressed with the superior storytelling skill on display in this big novel that a lesser author probably couldn’t pull off. It opens in the contemporary setting of the Fife Constabulary cold case unit. DI Karen Pirie is asked to track down Mick Prentiss who has been missing for more than twenty years, since the brutal miner’s strikes of the 1980′s when he was thought to have gone to work as a scab in Nottingham. But now that his daughter is desperate for a bone marrow donor for her very ill son she cannot find a trace of her father and turns to the police for help.

At the same time Pirie is given a much higher profile missing persons case to re-open. The local laird is Broderick Grant and twenty years earlier his only daughter and her baby son were kidnapped and held for ransom. However the exchange went horribly wrong which resulted in the daughter’s death and the grandson’s permanent disappearance. Now  a journalist has found some evidence that provides a concrete link to the old case and Grant wonders if he can find out what happened to his grandson once and for all.

These historical stories unfold concurrently throughout the novel, often hinting at how they will connect but I’m sure (at least I hope) I’m not the only reader who made several errors of guesswork before stumbling across the actual connections. McDermid really is a master of this kind of twist-filled plot because it is, at least until just before the end, continually surprising while maintaining a credibility that is often lacking from this kind of book.

But underneath the rollicking plot there is a real depth, particularly as McDermid describes life for the striking workers and their families. This is a subject I’m not terribly familiar with (in my defence I was 16 at the time and lived half a world away) but the details of day-to-day life included here had a very authentic feel to me. The real poverty being experienced by the striking workers, their disappointment in the strike’s leaders, the good and bad sides to the power of the local community are all deftly depicted and really made me feel like I have some small sense of this turbulent period. I’d recommend the book for this if nothing else.

The characters in the book are also enjoyable to meet, even the unpleasant ones like Broderick Grant who uses his money and influence in the way that such people often do. There are two strong female characters though in Karen Pirie and the journalist involved in the Grant case, Bel Richmond. Pirie is particularly engaging as she is constantly skating on thin ice with her superiors but because she has a history of good results she gets away with most of her unorthodox behaviour. And she does have a good offsider in DS Phil Parhatka who is, sometimes, able to reign in her wilder ideas.

McDermid somehow manages to avoid the sickly sentimentality that could easily overwhelm a book that tackles the kind of emotional storylines and themes as this one does. The undercurrent of dark humour probably helps, as does its almost entire lack of judgement about the people involved in the story and the actions they take. The more I read the more I realise just how rare a thing this is and the more I am grateful for those books which achieve it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A DARKER DOMAIN has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4/5
Narrator Eilidh Fraser
Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2009]
ASIN B0036KXP94
Length 11 hours 54 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Trick of the Dark by Val McDermid

Posted on by
13

Having complained often and at length about authors who write the same book over and over again I chose to TRICK OF THE DARK up precisely because it was clear from the disparity of opinion about it that, if nothing else, McDermid had written a different book from her previous work. My main exposure to her writing has been through the Tony Hill books which are a bit bloody for my taste though I do like her writing so I was keen to try more of her standalone novels.

There were lots of things I enjoyed about TRICK OF THE DARK though my relationship with the book didn’t start well as the main character, psychiatrist Charlie Flint, is angst-ridden about whether or not to cheat on her wife Maria with another woman. I groaned audibly I think as the ‘to cheat or not to cheat’ storyline is a particular annoyance of mine both in real life and in fiction (cheat if you must but don’t bend my ear about your vacillation is my motto). But even though that thread does run throughout the novel I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of this complicated and fast-paced book.

As well as considering embarking on an affair, Charlie is in professional disgrace as the book opens due to an assessment she had made in a criminal case. Although something of a side thread I found this quite fascinating as it explored the notion of guilt and whether or not people can or should be prevented by society from committing crimes they’ve only thought about. One morning she receives some curious news clippings in the mail about a murdered bridegroom she doesn’t know. After some plot contrivances she works out that the clippings have been sent by one of her tutors from her time at Oxford and the widower of the bridegroom is Magda, whom Charlie knew as Maggot when she used to babysit her some years ago. When she gets in touch with the tutor, Corinna, she is is asked to investigate Magda’s husband’s murder. Corinna doesn’t think the two people who have been found guilty of the murder were responsible, instead she blames Magda’s new love interest, a woman called Jay who is also a former student of Corinna’s and is now a very wealthy business woman. Corinna tells Charlie that if she does not investigate and find evidence of Jay’s guilt Corinna will do whatever it takes to protect her daughter from the woman she perceives as evil.

That’s about as simply as I can summarise the early part of the book and it gets more complicated from that point on but it’s surprisingly easy to follow. Though perhaps that’s just because McDermid has the skill to make such twists and turns look easy. The book does require the suspension of disbelief but I had no trouble doing that, quickly getting caught up in the whydunnit aspects of the novel and the lives of its three main characters.

In some ways I thought Charlie the least interesting of the three (though admit that’s mainly because I was bored by the whole cheating thread). Jay Stewart, whose point of view much of the story is told from, would be intriguing I think even if you weren’t always wondering in the back of your mind if she is a serial killer. She has already published one book, a misery memoir of her horrid childhood, to much acclaim and has been persuaded to write a second biography. This volume will focus on her more recent life of ‘triumph over tragedy’ and we learn about her life as she writes different chapters though readers are always aware of the unreliable nature of Jay’s ‘recollections’. It would be a terrific sign of society’s maturity to be able to write about this book without mentioning that the three main characters (and several minor ones) are lesbians but the women’s sexuality is a significant factor in the stories. Their various experiences of coming out (or not doing so) and being on the receiving end of homophobia significantly colours the lives of all the lesbians in the story and so is an integral part of the book. Unlike some of the more vitriolic reviews on Good Reads and Amazon I thought this aspect of the book was handled sensitively and intelligently.

TRICK OF THE DARK managed to draw me into subjects and worlds I have no experience of including the cloistered atmosphere of Oxford college and its lingering pull on all who attend, as well as the tribulations of being gay and hated for that fact (in my bubble world I like to think we’re all grown up about such things now but clearly not). Having had somewhat ambivalent expectations of this book through reading very positive and very negative reviews I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend the book to those who can suspend their disbelief in the interests of a ripping, and thought-provoking yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

TRICK OF THE DARK has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, Euro Crime (2), Petrona and Savidge Reads

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4/5
Author website http://www.valmcdermid.com/index.html
Publisher Hachette Digital [2010]
ISBN 9780748117017
Length 362 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: The Torment of Others by Val McDermid

Posted on by
11

The fourth book in Val McDermid’s successful series featuring psychologist and profiler Tony Jordan and DCI Carol Jordan opens with Jordan on extended leave following the events that took place in the previous book. She is approached to head up a new squad based at her old station in Bradfield which will focus on high profile cases and, when there aren’t any of those, will look at cold cases. Just as they receive a break in a recent cold case involving two missing boys a new murder requires the team’s immediate attention. A prostitute has been brutally tortured and murdered in exactly the same way as several women murdered two years previously. The only problem is that irrefutable forensic evidence convicted a man for those murders and he’s still locked up, having not spoken a word in two years.

I don’t know if the violence in some crime fiction has gotten worse or I have simply had my fill but I just don’t want to read another graphic description of the brutal rape, torture and murder of women (and it is almost always women). Is it not enough for the plot that a woman is raped and murdered? Is a story really made better by having a razor-blade impregnated object used for the purpose? Does each murder really need to be more bloody, more awful, more unimaginably painful and degrading than the last? For this book anyway the answer to that question seemed to be yes.

The worst thing is that not only did the violent depictions and language add nothing of value to the book but they weren’t in place of decent plotting and characters as would be the case with lesser writers The plot is cleverly constructed with all the threads being kept active at the right pace. There was a good balance of story advancement and personal interactions between the team members and the relationship between Carol and Tony Hill is now so fraught with emotional problems on both sides that it could generate a book of its very own. The razor-blade rapes and crude language detracted from these elements in the same way that people who swear constantly lose any capacity to underline a particularly strong emotion or point with a single well-placed curse word.

What about the audio book?

Vari Sylvester is a terrific narrator and because she is female I didn’t keep forming an image of Robson Green as the character of Tony Hill which I did when I listened to an earlier book in this series narrated by a man.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Author website http://www.valmcdermid.com/
Narrator Vari Sylvester
Publisher ISIS Audio Books [2004]
ISBN N/A
Length 13 hours 54 minutes
Format audio CD
Book Series #4 in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series
Source Borrowed from the library