If you’re a reader of crime fiction, you’re likely to have an impassioned opinion on the pair of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. I doubt there is any fictional duo that has frustrated me quite as much as them. Yet, these two creations of Val McDermid’s fertile imagination has me going back again and again to the books.

I’ve been re-reading the books to review them for the site—unfortunately in random order. I start with The Torment of Others, a book that is indelibly printed in my memory for the ‘hideous insights’ (Daily Telegraph in their review of the book) into a mind so deviant that it keeps one awake at night.

That I’ve read Val McDermid’s The Torment of Others twice is a sterling testimony to my nerves. In short, it’s a horrifying story featuring stomach-churning violence and messed-up individuals, brought together in an edge-of-your-seat package by a veteran author.

The Torment of Others reunites cop Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Tony Hill in an impossible quest. A deranged serial killer is going after prostitutes in the fictional English town of Bradfield, but here’s the twist—his signature is identical to a spate of killings for which a man has already been convicted. The case against Derek Tyler was cut and dried, and signed with unshakeable forensic evidence.

Read the rest of the review.

~PD

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