A review by punkinmuffin
The Wire In The Blood by Val McDermid

4.0

I am a bit late to the Val McDermid party but have been a fan of the tv series. It's interesting to note that the tv series departs significantly from the books in terms of storylines but not from character - Hermione Norris' Carol Jordan and Robson Green's Tony Hill are very close to the written characters.

This is the second in the series. After the disastrous dénoument of [b:The Mermaids Singing|459386|The Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #1)|Val McDermid|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389270695s/459386.jpg|88269] Carol Jordan has been promoted to DCI and relocated to East Yorkshire. She's inherited a squad who are resentful of her as an outsider, making it hard to get their buy-in on investigating what she believes is serial arson.

Meanwhile, Tony Hill has been given the go-ahead to create a National Profiling Taskforce. Sharing office space with the plods in Leeds (who are none too happy to have witch-doctors on their patch) he sets about training his baby profilers.

As an exercise, the trainees are assigned a series of missing persons cases, all involving young girls with a certain, shall we say, insouciant look. One super keen young profiler thinks she's found a real-life cluster of serial killer victims, and it all hits off from there. Carol gets drawn in as she seeks Tony's help profiling her arsonist, and is soon drawn in to his protegé's controversial theory.

No more because SPOILERS!