Stalker caught

Val McDermid (Sphere, £18.99)

The sixth in McDermid’s series Wire in the Blood, broadcast on ITV, this features the clinical psychologist and profiler Dr Tony Hill and his colleague and friend Det Chief Insp Carol Jordan.

With her team, they are desperately hunting a cruel serial killer. Using a social networking site called Rigmarole he is stalking seemingly unconnected teenagers in and around the imaginary town of Bradfield, mutilating and then murdering them.

At the heart of the novel is the complicated, warm and trusting friendship between Tony and Carol. Living in his house, she rents the downstairs flat. They need one another emotionally and professionally as they learn more about one another and the increasingly complicated nature of Tony’s family.

She, in turn, cares “more about him than the job that has provided her with so much meaning”. When the first murder takes place, Carol’s tough new boss James Blake says Tony’s job must go as part of the budget cuts while she in turn insists on “her right to do her job the way she wants”. When another teenager is murdered, Tony is hired by the Worcester Police.

Could the deaths in the two towns be linked in some way and will Tony be able to find a meaningful pattern to these deaths?

Then, in Worcester, he uncovers the truth about his past and his estranged father, while Carol decides, off her own bat, to confront Vanessa, Tony’s cruel mother, who has “swindled her son out of his inheritance”. McDermid’s seemingly effortless and complex plotting is a clever mixture of high-tech and conventional police detection. But most moving is the way she brings out the anguish and suffering of the parents as they search for their missing children. She makes her feelings clear when she says: “I’m a parent and the thought of losing my child — I don’t want to go there.”

Unrivalled in creating complex characters and taking them “into uncharted waters”, McDermid creates evocative, contemporary and disturbing settings.