Killing the Shadows - Softcover

McDermid, Val

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007217153 ISBN 13: 9780007217151

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2006

Synopsis

The Number One bestselling, award-winning Queen of crime fiction Val McDermid delivers a searing psychological suspense thriller. A serial killer is on the loose. His victims? Crime writers...

A murderer is at large, hunting with a bloodlust that shatters all the conventional wisdom on how serial killers operate.

Professor Fiona Cameron is a psychologist who uses computer technology to track serial offenders. She vowed never to work for the Met again after they went against her advice and screwed up an investigation as a result. But when her lover, thriller writer Kit Martin, tells her a fellow crime novelist has been murdered, Fiona can’t help taking an interest.

With the killer striking again, Fiona is caught in a race against time, not only to save a life, but to bring herself redemption, both personal and professional.

About this title

Review:

Our culture's obsession with serial killers as its own dark shadow sometimes obscures the fact that people kill for other reasons than sex. In Killing the Shadows Val McDermid's new detective, academic psychologist Fiona Cameron, has become something of a maverick because of her insistence on using other sorts of profiling as well as the standard psycho-sexual ones; she has refused to work for the Metropolitan police any more because of a murder they failed to solve because they took another psychologist's advice. Yet the woman murdered on Hampstead Heath preys on her conscience, along with her own murdered sister, as she works for the Spanish police on a killer who decorates the sights of Toledo with dead tourists. And then someone starts killing crime writers and Fiona's lover Kit is on the killer's list. Val McDermid's ingenuity and solid sense of how crime and investigation works have made her one of the dominant figures in contemporary British crime writing. Killing the Shadows is one of her best books yet, both for its powerful critique of modern policing and for the serious questions it asks about our fascination with the deadliest of criminals. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

'She is the real mistress of psychological gripping thrillers; no-one can plot or tell a story like she can. The hairs on my neck literally stood up' Express

'McDermid has become our leading pathologist of everyday evil... The subtle orchestration of terror is masterful' Guardian

'Dark, clever and timely' Scotland on Sunday

Praise for Val McDermid:

'Val McDermid is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic on the crime-writing road' Independent

‘Manchester's answer to Thomas Harris’ Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0007217153
• ISBN 13: 9780007217151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576