A Place of Execution - Hardcover

McDermid, Val

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002326760 ISBN 13: 9780002326766

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

A riveting psychological thriller, now a major ITV drama, from the Number One bestselling Queen of crime fiction Val McDermid.

In the Peak District village of Scarsdale, thirteen-year-old girls didn’t just run away. So when Alison Carter vanished in the winter of ’63, everyone knew it was a murder.

Catherine Heathcote remembers the case well. A child herself when Alison vanished, decades on she still recalls the sense of fear as parents kept their children close, terrified of strangers.

Now a journalist, she persuades DI George Bennett to speak of the hunt for Alison, the tantalizing leads and harrowing dead ends. But when a fresh lead emerges, Bennett tries to stop the story – plunging Catherine into a world of buried secrets and revelations.

About this title

Review:

Val McDermid is known for the violence, and tension, of her writing. Both The Mermaids Singing, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of 1995, and The Wire in the Blood (1997) are monuments to the human capacity for torture (and the psychological profiling supposed to counter it). No less thrilling, A Place of Execution is, however, a different kind of book. On one level, it is about the disappearance of a schoolgirl, Alison Carter, in December 1963: a girl from a tiny Derbyshire village whose disappearance turns into a personal quest for the detective heading the investigation, George Bennett. Resisting comparisons with events in Manchester (what are now known as the "Moors Murders"), Bennett is confronted with the strange and isolated community of Scardale: a community reputed to be a "a law unto itself", it may well harbour the kind of secret which allows murder to reverberate across the generations. Building slowly, suspensefully, McDermid takes her readers through Bennett's investigation and the trial which follows, projecting back to the beginning of the 1960s a very contemporary anxiety about the "desecration of childhood". It's an intelligent and compelling move, one that sustains the book's shift to the present and Bennett's return to the case decades later when he tells his story to the journalist, Catherine Heathcote. Heathcote is a woman who wants to know; complex, thoughtful, skillfully plotted, A Place of Execution suggests how unsettling that knowledge can be. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

'From the first pages, we know we're in the hands of a master this book will earn its author a place in that rare pantheon – the truly literary suspense novel' Jeffrey Deaver

‘Beautifully written ... It may be that McDermid will write better novels than this in the future, but I do not see how’ Daily Telegraph

'One of the best detective stories I've read' Ruth Rendell

‘A substantial book and an impressive one, possibly the best McDermid has written and it takes this most accomplished writer into higher territory’ Sunday Telegraph

'A Place of Execution is a wake-up call to crime writers everywhere. A terrific and original novel, brilliantly executed' Mirror

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0002326760
• ISBN 13: 9780002326766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416