Customer Reviews

The Torment of Others

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4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

With apologies to anyone who is reading this as a duplicative review, I am going to review all four of Val McDermid's Dr. Tony Hill/Carol Jordan novels in one place and copy the reviews individually.

I've now read seven of McDermid's books. She's not a great writer but she's a fabulous storyteller and her Tony Hill/Carol Jordan mysteries are the best of the bunch. The first two books aren't written terribly well, but the writing gets better as the series goes on. You may know these characters from the BBC series "Wire in the Blood" starring Robson Green. As an aside, while I generally find film and television adaptations to be far less satisfying than the source material on which they are based, the BBC series is really an exception. While the books have some detail that doesn't make it to the t.v. series, the television program really brings the characters to life and improves on the writing while staying true to the novels, although only the fourth book's plot actually made it to the screen.

As noted by some other reviewers, these books are not for the squeamish. McDermid doesn't pull any punches in writing about vicious psychopaths who commit sex crimes and the books may well be disturbing to many. The second book in particular (more below) actually gave me nightmares. McDermid, however, really gets into the heads of her twisted antagonists and she seems to have done a tremendous amount of research. Most importantly, both Dr. Hill, a clinical psychologist who consults with the police as a profiler, and Carol Jordan, the police officer with whom he works most closely, always feel like real people with investigative abilities and compassion that are easy to admire and foibles that are easy to relate to. They have serious difficulties in forging personal relationships which makes their relationship all the more poignant. Each book focuses on two stories -- a main investigation involving a psychopath and a secondary case that is generally no less compelling, while also following the relationship that develops between the two protagonists. If you've never read any of the books in this series, I would recommend taking them in order. The fourth book is the best, the third the worst, but it's worth reading them in order for the character development (although you could easily skip the third). If you really think you only want to read one, or aren't sure and don't care about spolers, just go straight to the last one. Some people who have read the entire series have found the fourth book repetitive, but it's the one that really works on all levels. Overall, the series gets 4 stars, but here are my individual assessments:

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1. The Mermaids Singing - 4 stars


The first of the series is really the only one that delves in any great detail into the personal lives of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, who come together to investigate the brutal torture and slayings of four men in northern England. McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan books all deal with issues of sexual identity, but this one does is particularly focused on that as the police suspect a gay man of killing heterosexual men. McDermid shares the thoughts of the killer as well as those of Dr. Hill, who relates all too well to the motivations of the subjects he is asked to profile. The writing in this book is kind of clunky, but the insights of the author into how and why someone sets out to cause maximum pain and humiliation still make it a riveting, if disturbing, read.

2. The Wire in the Blood -- 4 stars


In this second book in the series, teenaged girls are being abducted and brutally raped and tortured to death. We are introduced to an extremely smooth and charismatic character, Jacko Vance, a television celebrity and former star athlete, that Dr. Hill and Carol Jordan called upon to investigate. This is the hardest of the series to read, probably because the killer's victims are all extremely young, naive and female, with no chance whatsoever of fighting back. This book deals with charisma and celebrity as well as sexual deviance and although the writing is still somewhat awkward, it's generally a more compelling novel than the Mermaids Singing.

3. The Last Temptation -- 3 stars

This is the weakest book in the series. On the plus side, McDermid decides to branch out from northern England and take the reader into continental Europe, particularly Germany, where Carol Jordan has gone as an undercover operative to investigate a drug dealer/slave trader. Tony Hill is also in Europe, helping the police solve a series of murders in which psychologists are the victims. McDermid brings to light some of the darker deeds of the Nazis that are generally not known and discussed and for this she should be commended. The writing also starts to improve with this book and the secondary protagonists, two female, European police officers who develop a long-term relationship with each other, are the best of any of the books. There are some serious problems with the novel, however, that make it the weakest of the bunch. First of all, in the other books McDermid is writing about the North of England, which she clearly knows like the back of her hand. The locale in the other books is really the third character after Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. The European locations never quite come to life in the same way. But the biggest problem with The Last Temptation is that McDermid tries too hard to force a particular ending. In order to get where she wants to go, she has to have Carol Jordan do something completely out of character and, frankly, she doesn't do a good job of convincing us of the reason. The whole book feels a bit contrived. Kudos to McDermid for trying something different instead of just writing variations on a theme, but the theme is one she does really well and this effort is a bit disappointing.

4. The Torment of Others -- 5 stars

There's a reason this made the best adaptation of McDermid's books for the BBC series "Wire in the Blood." By this point, McDermid had started to write really well, and she'd really gotten the hang of tying the two story lines together. In the main story, someone is killing prostitutes with the m.o. used by a man currently in an insane asylum. How does the killer know exactly what the prior murderer did? The mystery is more satisfying than that of the prior novels and the sub-plot, involving kidnapped boys, also intrigues. There's not much to learn at this point about Dr. Hill, but while the third book didn't entirely work, the aftereffects of that novel's events on Carol Jordan are all too real and bring the characters' relationship to a new level.

If books on criminal profiling and psychological forensics are your thing, you'll probably really enjoy McDermid's work. If someone has recommended her writing to you and the Dr. Hill/Carol Jordan mysteries sound like they are too gruesome, check out the Grave Tattoo, which is a neat, little literary mystery.

This is one tough book!! Really dark, really gruesome, really creepy, really good! Carol Jordan is far from recovered from the last book and Tony Hill is really at a loss as to how to help her, but decides that proximity is the first step. That's the good news. The bad news is that Carol is put in charge of a new investigative squad whose members haven't gelled yet and who can't necessarily be trusted to act as a team vs. in each individual's own interest. AND they have a horrible and relentless serial criminal on their hands. This is one breathless read. You do need to stop sometimes just to escape the cruelty and darkness, though. I don't even want to think of how and where McDermid came up with this one. It smacks a lot of her first ("Mermaids Singing") but the similar crimes seem so much worse when they are visited on women. This is just heavy with the shock of insanity and yet it has a glowing, redemptive quality as well. It is hard to see how McDermid's writing could improve and yet she manages it over and over again. Now the long wait begins for her next outing.

I'm definitely a McDermid fan, but a picky one. In general, I think her stand-alones are stand-outs, but I find Kate Brannigan and her sidekick annoying, and the Lindsay Gordon series is uneven. Up till now, the Hill/Jordan series has been quite strong, but the formula is starting to wear out in "Torment of Others." (Which is not all McDermid's fault, of course; such is the nature of even the best fiction formulae.)

For starters, the plot rises rather high on the implausibility scale; I'm willing to suspend a lot of disbelief when it comes to fiction, but there's a limit, and this book surpasses it. And maybe I just read too much, but the "inside-the-killer's-head" narrative strategy is becoming a little threadbare, too.

Then there are the main characters, who have lost a lot of their former complexity. It's as if McDermid has gotten tired of developing them and instead allows one or two traits to serve as a sort of shorthand for the more-fully-realized characters of yore. Tony, the psychological profiler, has become practically infallible, never making a professional misjudgment. His leaps of intuition are always right on the money. Carol, the maverick detective, is now erratic in ways that are only partly explained by her current psychological situation as a recovering rape victim -- too often her character seems sacrificed to the needs of the story. Carol is supposedly a crack professional, top-notch in her field, yet she overlooks things that can be spotted even by a reader like me, whose knowledge of police work comes solely from reading detective novels. For instance, when Carol & Co. decide to use a cop as a decoy prostitute to suss out the killer, I said to myself, "A decoy? But it's clear that the killer knows the Bradfield red-light district intimately; he'll spot her instantly as a suspicious newcomer." Yet pages and pages elapse before this idea occurs to Carol (or to anyone else except, of course, Tony). And not even an amateur would overlook the possibility that, if one child murder victim is found buried in an out-of-the-way spot, the body of another victim might be in the same area. Yet Tony has to point this out to Carol, who figuratively smacks herself in the head and says, "Why didn't I think of that?" Why? Perhaps because plot has been allowed to trump character.

One element of the Hill/Jordan series that I really like, however, is the presence of gay and lesbian characters whose sexuality is not the point of the story; they are just part of the milieu, the way they would be in life. A few other Amazon reviewers have complained about this presence, seeing it as too heavy-handed, as evincing too much of an "agenda" on McDermid's part. But most novels have no gay characters at all; I wonder if these same Amazon reviewers think such books are promoting a heavy-handed *heterosexual* "agenda." If homosexuality seems too prominent in "Torment of Others," I fear that's a flaw of this particular difficult-to-swallow plot; it doesn't indicate any problem with representing gay characters as such. To my mind, the more visible they are, the better. So rock on, Val.

McDermid is an excellent writer. Very few writers could deal with the ultra-violent spectrum of crime without descending into sensationalism. McDermid manages to straddle that line beautifully. I never get the feeling that she is intending to titillate with the suffering of the victims.

While it is nice to see Hill and Jordan together again, the book unfortunately lacks a bit of the spark that made a book like The Wire in the Blood so great. I would truthfully give this book three or three-and-a-half stars, but have rounded it up out of deference to the very high quality of the prose. I am not really sure what is missing, but it somehow felt like we were back again at the same point that we were at the beginning of the series, only with everyone a little bit more battered. Carol Jordan, in particular, needs to have some progression that is not rooted in emotional damage.

One unfortunate note was that I guessed the identity of the villain very early on. I am not sure if that is a fault in the plotting or just a lucky guess on my part. Whichever was the case, it took a lot of tension out of the reading experience for me.

If you have never read a Hill-Jordan McDermid before, then I would recommend that you consider starting with The Wire in the Blood or The Mermaids Singing. Established fans will probably get what they came for, but should be aware that The Torment of Others is far from the best in the series.

The Torment of Others starts in a relatively routine way, with three familiar story lines. Two young boys have gone missing, one turning up in a porn photo. Two years ago, the problem in Bradfield was a vicious killer targeting prostitutes. Enter Inspector Judy Hill, herself a rape victim who has been on extended leave, but now agrees to return to help find the little boys. Can she make a comeback, or has she been damaged too profoundly? But they caught that guy and he's now institutionalized, so when murders with the same MO begin again, the police are flummoxed. Nothing new there.
Val McDermid writes police procedurals with all the newest techie bells and whistles, but doesn't neglect the all important human element. As Hill teams up again with friend and former lover Tony Hill, psych profiler, those around them are also obliged to thread their way through a maze of increasingly multicultural relationships. Who's in and who's out? As their two depressingly sordid cases converge and separate, a series of unforeseen developments emerge to create a surprising climax. Bloody, creepy, and all too real, this is a page turner of a crime novel, in which nobody's perfect.

"The Torment of Others" is the fourth in the electrifying Dr. Tony Hill/Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan series by Val McDermid, a quickly-emerging writer. Like her others, it's set in Bradfield, a fictional northern English city much like Manchester, where McDermid, after graduation from Oxford, worked as a journalist for 16 experience-enriching years.

The author was born and raised in a Scottish mining town, and though this series is set in England's north country, she writes the toughest tartan noir going: sharp-humored and bloody-minded. In 1995, she won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the year. Her novel "A Place of Execution" won a "Los Angeles Times" book prize, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and was named a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year. Mind you, she frequently makes use of oft-seen plot devices. Yet she seems to break new ground with each book, always at the margins of society, where most of us have not been.

In "Torment" DCI Jordan returns to Bradfield after a disastrous German assignment, in which she did not receive the full support she needed from her superiors. Once back in the aging industrial city, she again joins forces with Hill to crack two puzzling cases. Someone is kidnapping young boys at rather long intervals. And someone is torturing and murdering prostitutes. The latter case is considered doubly mysterious because, in a familiar plot device, the town had an identical series of crimes two years earlier. Irrefutable forensic evidence brought the conviction of a deeply disturbed young man, now safely locked away in a mental institution. Is there a copycat on the loose? The desperation of local police brass to solve this case will result in their sending out another insufficiently supported young woman decoy, the aftermath of which will echo Jordan's German experience.

McDermid is always strong on forensics and police procedure. She demonstrates an appreciation of the suffering of victims of crime, and the burdens of law enforcement work. She can keep several plots spinning at a time. Further, her Dr. Hill provides stimulating psychological insights into the criminal mind. She also writes vividly and well. She probably can also write quickly: she's actually doing three series, as well as the odd standalone. But be warned, the squeamish and sensitive among you; this book, like many/most of her others, is not for you.

Derek Tyler has been in a mental institution for two years, locked away after confessing to a string of savage crimes, the ritual mutilation and murder of four prostitutes. Derek's not a bright guy, but his crimes were meticulously planned: the Voice, after all, had given him very precise instructions. Elevated by his acts of sadism, Derek was changed from one of life's losers to a somebody whose crimes could terrorize a community and stump the police, at least for a while. But two years on, with Derek safely behind the bars of his asylum, it's happening again: prostitutes are being killed in precisely the same way, grisly details that had never been released to the public replicated in a gory reprise of the earlier murders. And the Voice is commanding a new killer.

The elite major incident squad investigating the killings has brought in Britain's top psychological profiler to consult on the case, but Dr. Tony Hill is, frankly, at a loss. There is no doubt that Derek Tyler was guilty of the first crimes, and a copycat killer would need inside information about the Tyler murders to reenact them. More problematic is that no one else would want to reenact the murders, at least not for the purpose of satisfying their own sexual fantasies. As Dr. hill repeatedly insists, no two people committing sexually motivated homicides will derive satisfaction from the same complex of details--how their victims are bound, how they are tortured, how they are killed.

While Tony Hill tries to enter the mind of the maniac cleaning up Bradfield's red-light district, the city's police department, under the leadership of DCI Carol Jordan, investigates the crime by more traditional means--poring through paperwork, interrogating everyone working and living in the seedy area in which the crimes took place, and planting an undercover policewoman among the city's vulnerable working girls.

Val McDermid's The Torment of Others, the fourth book in her series featuring profiler Tony Hill, is a solid police procedural and simply a very good read: well-written, with likeable but flawed good guys, creepy bad guys, and a plot that will keep you guessing until Tony himself starts putting the pieces together. And when he does that, some 60 pages from the book's close, readers will be hard pressed indeed to put this one down.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

DCI Carol Jordan and Dr. Tony Hill are once again working together in "The Torment of Others," a dark and depressing police procedural in which a sadist is kidnapping, torturing and murdering prostitutes. In addition, Jordan and her colleagues are still looking for the perp who abducted and presumably killed two young boys whose bodies have never been found.

Jordan and Hill have plenty of personal demons to exorcise. Jordan was raped during an undercover sting that went wrong, and she has been gun shy about returning to police work since that horrible event left her in shock. Hill feels guilty since he failed to protect Carol, whom he secretly loves. Their friendship has been strained ever since, and they are uncertain about how to behave in one another's presence.

Jordan in now back heading an elite Major Incident Squad. She knows that everyone is waiting to see if she is still up to the job intellectually and emotionally, and she is determined to prove her mettle. The two high-profile cases that she is investigating will test her powers of concentration, her patience, and her ability to command. To make matters worse, there is very little forensic evidence in either case that might lead to quick arrests.

Val McDermid is one of the undisputed masters of the British police procedural. She puts us in the incident room with the detectives, and she makes us feel the pressure that the detectives experience as they fan out to conduct endless interviews, most of which end up giving them "no joy." As the bodies of victims pile up with no suspects in sight, Carol and her team begin to believe that their adversary, the unknown serial killer, is too smart and/or too lucky to get caught. When her boss suggests putting one of Carol's officers on the street posing as a prostitute to attract the killer, Carol is reluctant to go along; after all, she was once asked to act as a decoy by her superiors, with tragic results. Can she, in good conscience, allow one of her own officers to take such a chance?

"The Torment of Others" is a powerful story of psychological terror. Carol's fears, Tony Hill's weird empathy with the "nutters" whom he treats, and the perverse forces that plague each individual, whether cop or criminal, are depicted with depth, insight, and frightening detail. The novel is genuinely scary at times, and the ending is both tense and brutal. Val McDermid pulls no punches; she is not afraid to go over to the dark side in her fiction. On a more romantic note, McDermid explores Carol's tentative efforts to have a relationship with a man. She starts dating a hunky geologist who may have information that might help her with a case, leaving Tony Hill almost mad with jealousy.

My quibbles about this book are few, but they are worth mentioning. The serial killer who preys on prostitutes has been done to death, and although this time there is a new twist that changes the scenario somewhat, it still is a stale plot element that has been overused. In addition, I found the solution to the crime to be exciting and enthralling, but completely unrealistic. Most readers will need a huge suspension of disbelief to buy what McDermid is selling. Still, McDermid is one of the best salespersons around, and "The Torment of Others" is an eerie, creepy, daring, and shocking story that is as mesmerizing as it is gruesome.

While not as heart-stoppingly suspenseful as "The Mermaid's Singing," this latest Tony Hill/Carol Jordan mystery novel proved to be a very riveting and compelling read, that will (need I say it?) keep you completely glued to your chair until the very last page.

When a prostitute is found brutal murdered in a manner similar to a previous case from a few years ago also involving murdered prostitutes, DCI Carol Jordan and her team think that they've a copycat on their hands. But this, according to criminal psychologist, Dr. Tony Hill, is not the case. His belief is that the same person who was responsible for those murders, is responsible for this one as well. The problem is that there was irrefutable forensic evidence as well as a confession for that first case, and Derek Tyler is currently serving time in a mental institution for those first murders. Tyler's claim, hitherto dismissed as the fantasies of a deranged mind, was that the "voice" had told him what to do and how to do it. Could his fantastic claims be true? Could there be a sinister, twisted personality out there who derives pleasure and satisfaction from manipulating others to commit, vicious, brutal murders against women? As the body count rises and pressure to make a quick arrest mounts, Carol's newly formed Major Incident Team begins to fall apart as the different personalities clash -- some even begin to question if Carol is up to the job given that she's still feeling raw and vulnerable from having been assaulted a few months ago. Carol must now put her personal qualms aside in order to bring her team together so that they can work as an integrated unit as well as get them to trust her instincts and leadership again. Fortunately, she has Tony Hill backing her up in more ways than one...

Taut and fast paced, "The Torment of Others" was an incredibly engrossing read that really kept me guessing for quite a while. At some point, a few readers may get an inkling as to what's going on and who the guilty party may be; fortunately, the author took great care to make plausible suspects of a few key characters, so that if you enjoy trying to solve the mystery along with the lead detectives, you're in for a treat. And by filtering in Tony's and Carol's complex and unresolved feelings, Carol's still raw feelings about her rape, and Tony's feelings of guilt, Val McDermid also makes "The Torment of Others" a much more multifaceted and more textured read.

Chilling and horrifying, "The Torment of Others" definitely is a very well written and clever mystery novel. And while Val McDermid has written more suspenseful thrillers, "The Torment of Others" rates high as a very satisfying and chilling police procedural. Definitely a "not-to-be-missed" thriller.

The tawdry glamour of Temple Hill, Bradfield is the setting for Val McDermid's latest thriller The Torment of Others. Home of prostitutes, rent boys, homeless people, and drug dealers; redbrick and seedy, Temple Fields harbors shop fronts with little allure, small entrepreneurial businesses with rundown, dilapidated bed sits above. It's a foggy, disparate inner-city suburb, and an easy place for a serial killer to hide and strike without warning.

Someone, haunted by "the Voice" has begun to prowl the streets of Temple Fields at night. The Voice is inside his head, telling him it's time to move again, time for the next chapter of the lesson, and time for another cleansing. He doesn't think of the prostitutes as individuals with a name; he'll just think of them as rubbish that has to be got rid of before it poisons the world he has to live in.

In The Torment of Others, the scruffy profiler Dr. Tony Hill and the hardheaded, intuitive detective Carol Jordan are back in the city of Bradfield, working together again to find this killer who is tying up prostitutes and killing them slowly while a video camera records in the background. The women are being murdered in a manner identical to a previous investigation three years ago, but the killer, Derek Tyler confessed to the murders and has been incarcerated in the Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital, where Tony now works.

Carol, in her battle for restoration, is pushed by her boss John Brandon to mount an undercover operation using DC Paula McIntyre, who resembles the victims. Not only does this bring back awful memories for Carol, who was raped in an undercover operation, but also because the operation itself ends up going goes awry. Tony is perplexed that the killer knows so much about the police's maneuverings. Could it be an inside job? Could the killer have perhaps had help from someone on the Force?

Tony is convinced that Derek Tyler knows something about the modus operandi of the murders and attempts to break the killer's three-year silence through some sharp psychological interrogation. He even tells Carol that there could be two killers, who are being manipulated to be instruments of someone else's murderess fantasies. A voyeur turned puppet-master who is getting off on the assertion of absolute power and is controlling and masterminding the whole production. This "someone" uses bondage because it increases the foolproof quality of the attack and his victims are submissive from the start.

Like the handcuffs that are used to grip the young girls to the bed, this deftly plotted and totally suspenseful novel holds you tight and never lets you go. Like no other author, McDermid excels in presenting the darker side of human nature, the world of psych-sexual deviancy that can lurk just beneath the surface of everyday lives.

For the first time Tony and Carol find themselves stumped in their efforts to map the mind of the murderer. For some reason the killers mind feels "as slippery as saturated autumn leaves that would fall apart in his hands before Tony could examine them." And although Tony knows that finding the killer involves first finding the thread, the problem is untangling the web of external symbols and translating their meanings.

Atmospheric and riveting, this terrific book jumps out at you and never loses pace. The obvious is turned inside out as the plot twists in a serpentine path to a nail-biting ending. The characters are completely realistic, especially the emotionally fraught Carol as she tries to resist the easy comfort of alcohol - nervous of its easy promise of oblivion. She keeps telling herself that she doesn't want to sleepwalk through the aftermath of rape. "She wants to deal with it, to unpick its effects and put herself back together in something approximating the right order."

McDermid is a master of cunning and innovative plot twists; and the author well knows the intricacies of police procedural and the criminal mind, the easy deception inherent in human nature. She writes from the heart, with what she knows so well - the uneasy psychology of the serial killer.

In Temple Fields, the streets form a web around the spider's prey; life goes on in patterns too deep-set to be altered by the heavy weight of the police presence. And the killer continues to swagger on, wrapped in a sense of contemptuous invulnerability. No one is as they seem in this highly enthralling and gripping novel with a nail biting ending that is full of surprises as it is action-packed. Mike Leonard July 05.