The Wire In the Blood
Crime, Female Detectives, Mystery, Nordic Noir
Val McDermid
Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, Book # 2
HarperCollins
1997
ebook
532
English
January 14, 2019 January 21, 2019
Young girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind. Dr Tony Hill, head of the new National Profiling Task Force, sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of missing teenagers and asked to discover any possible links between the cases. Only one officer comes up with a theory – a theory that is ridiculed by the group … until one of their number is murdered and mutilated. For Tony Hill, the murder becomes a matter for personal revenge and, joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks on a campaign of psychological terrorism – a game where hunter and hunted can all too easily be reversed.
About the book
After solving the case in the previous book, The Mermaids Singing, Tony Hill has finally managed to get funds for a special task force to solve serial killer cases. In this second volume, we find Tony teaching some agents how to solve cases with psychology. He gives a task to his “pupils”, finding the connection between different cases of missing teenagers. Only Shaz sees a connection and is convinced who the culprit is, but nobody believes her. Only Tony sees that maybe she is on the right track but will he be able to stop her before she makes any mistakes?
Meanwhile, Carol Jordan is busy with her team in a case of a pyromaniac and her superiors force her to contact Tony for a psychological profile of the pyromaniac.
I don’t understand the author’s style… the first chapter is very long, as well as the fifth, the second, third and fourth are short. But this division into chapters makes no sense… in the long chapters there are short spaces that separate different scenes (because the long chapters are “subdivided” into mini sections, but frankly, they don’t stand out well in the ebook since the separation is very short – I know this is an edition problem) so I don’t see why there must be chapters so long and others short. I can understand having new chapters for the killer’s scenes, but why not for the other scenes? Perhaps because they are so short that the author thinks we get bored? Honestly, I don’t get bored with short chapters but I read more. So although I like these books, I don’t like the style so much (and I don’t remember very well, but reading the review made of the first book I liked her style, so I don’t know if I changed my view, or I was not so interested then or if the author changed her style).
I thought I would be bored at first with the “student” part of the “task force” but honestly I like the subject and therefore I didn’t find it boring at all. I couldn’t wait for Tony and Carol to meet again because I knew they would meet because the series is called “Tony and Carol” and because it always happens in books.
Another rather unusual fact is that Carol, after the first long chapter is put aside and the story focuses only on Tony and his team. And I don’t understand why since the series is called Tony Hill and Carol Jordan… (but right now I’m halfway through the book so maybe I’ll understand it at the end).
Shaz, oh Shaz what about you? When she was introduced I thought she would take Carol’s place, then I realized that Carol is most likely to take her place in future books and I’m really sorry for what happens to her, but it’s easy to see that she becomes the killer’s target.
I loved when most of Hill’s team gets together to solve the case with Carol and Chris Donovan (the former Shaz’s boss) because it is obvious that the police investigating doesn’t know what is going on and I couldn’t wait for Tony & Co to find evidence just to show off.
I like the fact that the team is united to find the killer, I like team work (maybe that’s why my favorite show is Criminal Minds) and how there are the premises of a good team. I hope this is just the beginning, I hope to find all three trainees again, supported by Hill and Carol in the next books. I would have liked Shaz to be there, but I cann’t have everything, right?
I don’t understand why two women must die in this book. And to think that the author is a woman… the book is dated, so at that time it was believed that women had to stay at home to take care of the family, so why does the author have to kill two women who were following the right path and making their own way? She practically says women who thinks with their head get themselves killed… a little bit of female power for God’s sake!!
At first I didn’t understand what the pyromaniac case had to do with the rest of the story. And in fact it has nothing to do with it, only at the end Carol tells Tony how she feels about having lost her agent and that she now shares something with Tony, feeling responsible for a person’s death. It’s all part of the character’s growth.
I don’t like that the book is practically not finished. I know that all the heroes of the books must have an anti-hero, but why that character? I don’t like him! But we’ll see if he will appear again in a next book.
In conclusion, I liked the book very much (I know it doesn’t seem from all the “I don’t/didn’t like”, but seriously, the plot was nerve-racking), it was so intense that I spent whole evenings reading even more than 100 pages a night which is a record for me 
