A Place of Execution - Softcover

McDermid, Val

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312644531 ISBN 13: 9780312644536

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2009

Synopsis

On a freezing day in December 1963, Alison Carter vanishes from her rural village, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case—a suspected murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he’d have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome that reverberates through the years.            Decades later Bennett finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when the book is poised for publication, he unaccountably tries to pull the plug. He has new information that he refuses to divulge, new information which threatens the very foundations of his existence. Catherine is forced to reinvestigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down.             A Greek tragedy in modern England, A Place of Execution is a taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes, and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multilayered narrative that turns expectation on its head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know.  A Place of Execution is a 2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.

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 real 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 with lots of suspense, McDermid takes her readers through Bennett's investigation and the trial that 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, skilfully plotted, A Place of Execution suggests how unsettling that knowledge can be. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

"One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever."--"Newsday"

"Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish."--"Wall Street Journal"

"Val McDemid's best work to date."--"Times Literary Supplement"

One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever. "Newsday"

Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish. "Wall Street Journal"

Val McDemid's best work to date. "Times Literary Supplement""

One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever. Newsday

Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish. Wall Street Journal

Val McDemid's best work to date. Times Literary Supplement

"

"One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever." --Newsday

"Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish." --Wall Street Journal

"Val McDemid's best work to date." --Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0312644531
• ISBN 13: 9780312644536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416