Scan barcode
A review by paulabrandon
Fever Of The Bone by Val McDermid
1.0
Val McDermid has written some cracking serial killer thrillers (The Mermaids Singing, Killing The Shadows), and the other books in this series have been good. But this sixth installment is sadly just another bog standard, plodding police procedural, and it bored me rigid.
Carol Jordan's squad has a new boss, and he doesn't want them spending money on profiler Tony Hill, so they're forced to go it alone when a couple of teenage boys turn up dead with their genitals removed. As for Tony, he's consulting on a case in which a teenage girl has had her genitals mutilated.
It takes more than 300 pages for the detectives to even connect these crimes.
Most of this book is actually concerned with Tony Hill reconnecting with the father he never knew, who has died and left Tony with some considerable wealth. Carol Jordan spends a great deal of time investigating and uncovering the life of Tony's father to help him out. Time that she could have spent on her murder inquiry, you know? No wonder it takes so long for them to connect all the deaths.
Events are padded out with a completely pointless, unrelated subplot involving a cold case of a woman and her missing child. Why was this even here?
My other pet hate was that tropetastic police procedural norm of learning all about the life and thoughts of a character, who exists merely to discover a dead body, who is then never heard from again! Padding out the word count or what? It's so pointless!
McDermid is better than her peers in regards to showing rather than telling when it comes to her characters and what they're good at. The book is well-written. Tony and Carol have a complex, strange, yet oddly believable relationship.
But that's all for naught when there's so little on offer. The plot moves at a snail's pace, one subplot is completely pointless, and the other seems to be of as much focus as the actual serial killings themselves. There are no real suspects in the crimes, and zero red herrings, so there's no fun in trying to pick out the killer yourself or trying to tie it all together yourself. The characters just blather around for 400 pages until someone uncovers a vital clue. I had absolutely zero stakes in anything that happened here.
Feverishly dull.
Carol Jordan's squad has a new boss, and he doesn't want them spending money on profiler Tony Hill, so they're forced to go it alone when a couple of teenage boys turn up dead with their genitals removed. As for Tony, he's consulting on a case in which a teenage girl has had her genitals mutilated.
It takes more than 300 pages for the detectives to even connect these crimes.
Most of this book is actually concerned with Tony Hill reconnecting with the father he never knew, who has died and left Tony with some considerable wealth. Carol Jordan spends a great deal of time investigating and uncovering the life of Tony's father to help him out. Time that she could have spent on her murder inquiry, you know? No wonder it takes so long for them to connect all the deaths.
Events are padded out with a completely pointless, unrelated subplot involving a cold case of a woman and her missing child. Why was this even here?
My other pet hate was that tropetastic police procedural norm of learning all about the life and thoughts of a character, who exists merely to discover a dead body, who is then never heard from again! Padding out the word count or what? It's so pointless!
McDermid is better than her peers in regards to showing rather than telling when it comes to her characters and what they're good at. The book is well-written. Tony and Carol have a complex, strange, yet oddly believable relationship.
But that's all for naught when there's so little on offer. The plot moves at a snail's pace, one subplot is completely pointless, and the other seems to be of as much focus as the actual serial killings themselves. There are no real suspects in the crimes, and zero red herrings, so there's no fun in trying to pick out the killer yourself or trying to tie it all together yourself. The characters just blather around for 400 pages until someone uncovers a vital clue. I had absolutely zero stakes in anything that happened here.
Feverishly dull.