Julia, Lisanne and Brigid
With love
About the Author
Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three years as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. Now a full-time writer, she lives in Cheshire.
The Wire in the Blood is Val McDermid’s second book featuring criminal profiler, Tony Hill. The first, The Mermaids Singing, won the 1995 Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The third, The Last Temptation, is now available in paperback.
A Place of Execution, a complex and disturbing stand-alone thriller, was awarded the 2001 LA Times Book of the Year Award (Mystery/Thriller category). Her other stand-alone thriller, Killing the Shadows, received critical acclaim on its release in 2000.
She has also written six crime novels featuring Manchester PI Kate Brannigan, and the latest of these, Star Struck, won the Grand Prix des Romans d’Aventure in France.
A further five novels feature journalist-sleuth Lindsay Gordon.
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Praise for The Wire in the Blood
‘This is a shocking book, stunningly exciting, horrifyingly good. It is so convincing that one fears reality may be like this and these events the awful truth’
RUTH RENDELL
‘The Wire in the Blood is truly frightening. McDermid’s capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing, and she is equally adept at portraying the interactions, allegiances and petty jealousies that exist among the investigators. Hill, driven and disturbed, is an appealing and original character. This is a writer who just gets better and better’
MARCEL BERLINS, The Times
‘Terrific chiller from Manchester’s answer to Thomas Harris. Val McDermid can do what the Americans do so effortlessly—get inside the mind of a serial killer. Thank God for Dr Tony Hill and psychological profiling’
LUCRETIA STEWART, Guardian
‘Tension-filled sequel to The Mermaids Singing…The story, handled with verve, wit and style, never flags’
FRANCES FYFIELD, Mail on Sunday
‘This is a clever and exciting thriller’
SUSANNA YAGER, Sunday Telegraph
‘The novel has the same compelling combination of sexual-political mischief and Jacobean psychological intensity that earned the author the crime novel of the year award…for The Mermaids Singing’
JOHN DUGDALE, Sunday Times
‘The book [has] a sense of gravitas and intelligence utterly beyond lesser writers in the field…This is a wholly satisfying read which cleverly subverts tradition and expectation. Having already awarded her previous Tony Hill novel a Gold Dagger, someone better be smelting the platinum’
IAN RANKIN, Scotland on Sunday
‘The plot is a cracker…You will shiver in your socks longer than usual after reaching the last page. And you will almost certainly rush to buy Val McDermid’s follow-up novel’
CARLA McKAY, Daily Mail
‘McDermid is no novice at tense thriller writing and it shows. Her handling is sly and sophisticated, weaving the mundane with the stomach-churningly depraved’
‘Blood count exceptionally high; horripulation guaranteed’
PHILIP OAKES, Literary Review
‘Intelligent, convincing and compelling, The Wire in the Blood takes risks with plot and character, undercutting all the normal devices of thriller structure in a highly readable and scary book’
New Woman
‘Her writing is never less than excellent, and she keeps the multiple ensemble cast together…Not one to give even a minor character short shrift, she has worked very hard to pack it all in’
Crime Time
‘As usual Val McDermid…orchestrates the macabre melange of TV stardom, murder and detective work like a master’
ERIC JACKSON, Manchester Evening News
By the same author
Killing the Shadows
A Place of Execution
The Distant Echo
The Grave Tattoo
TONY HILL NOVELS
The Last Temptation
The Mermaids Singing The Torment of Others
KATE BRANNIGAN NOVELS
Star Struck
Blue Genes
Clean Break
Crack Down
Kick Back
Dead Beat
LINDSAY GORDON NOVELS
Booked for Murder
Union Jack
Common Murder
Report for Murder
NON-FICTION
A Suitable Job for a Woman
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
Four Quartets,
Burnt Norton
T. S. Eliot
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1997
Copyright © Val McDermid 1997
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © 1997 ISBN: 9780007327607
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