Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More human than Cornwell and more thought than Patterson, 24 Jun 2000
Val McDermid is one of the few writers which successfully merge the reality of a UK setting with the thrill of the chase.Her background as a newspaper reporter seems to enable her to write developing stories in a style that makes you feel you are there. Her characters are more human than those found in Patricia Cornwell's police thrillers, and the characters have more depth than the typical James Patterson. She avoids the new realism which seems to demand more explicit torture scenes in short chapters, relying instead on a more thoughtful exposition of the motives involved and a true sense of time in the plotting. Her development of the personality of Tony Hill is well-paced, and manages to blend the abstract analytical facet of his work with his human frailties and self-blindness. This book encouraged me to read her back-catalogue works; the schoolgirl mystery stories of Lindsay Duncan and the Warshawski-like Brannigan series which although lighter in tone show the love of detail on which this more mature work depends for its success. I unreservedly recommend it as a more human approach than Cornwell and created with rather more thought and insight than Patterson.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grippingly Superb!, 4 Sep 2002
By A Customer
What a great book! I was hooked from the minute I began to read. The characters became so real and the plot so nerve-tinglingly tense, that I could not put this book down! By the time I got to the last few chapters, I found myself reading faster and faster just so that I could find out what would happen next - would Batman arrive in time?!!! Seriously though, the detailed descriptions of the killer's methods (to me) were necessary for the heightening of the tension. Without such detail, the killer would not have seemed half as scary or crazy. If you love a good read and have a very strong stomach, read and enjoy!
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sickening, revolting, sadistic, stomach-churning and clearly the work of a devilish and twisted mind. I LOVED IT., 24 Oct 2006
This may be a review of a book published in 1995, but eleven years later it still stands tall, together with its creator, among more contemporary peers. The first in what has turned out to be a highly successful series involving criminal psychologist Dr Tony Hill, it is gripping from cover to cover and has that rare bonus of a climax that in every way complements the build-up, even if that climax could be criticised for a slight lack of credibility. Many thrillers or works of crime fiction have complex and exciting story-lines, only for the reader to be let down by the conclusion. Not so with The Mermaids Singing - it has few weaknesses at any point. Not only that, but for anyone who is lucky enough to have no advance knowledge of the outcome, a real surprise is in store! And perhaps the real treat, for want of a better word, is a generally convincing examination of the mind of a murderous psychopath - the motives, the planning, the execution.
It's a serial killer novel, the bodies of the male victims having been deposited in selected locations popular with the gay community in the northern English town of Bradfield (possibly a fictitious amalgamation of Bradford and Sheffield), and having earlier been subjected to a variety of forms of torture using instruments based on historical fact or folklore dating back many centuries. Throughout the course of the story, not only are the police completely stumped as to who the killer might be - they have no suspects at all - the reader is likely to form a similar view, seeing as how the planning of the murders is so comprehensive, with every effort made to leave not a trace of forensic evidence. The killer comes over as highly intelligent, so if I had to level a criticism, I would suggest that this intelligence takes something of a day off in the hour of reckoning, which seems somewhat out of sorts with the character that had been built up in our minds so thoroughly throughout the bulk of the book. It's nit-picking, but another reviewer here is right to point this out - although somewhat more severely than I have done.
This is the novel that introduces us not only to Tony Hill and DI Carol Jordan, but to the earliest seeds of their romance that is to be re-kindled in The Wire in the Blood, The Last Temptation, The Torment of Others, and a fifth novel due out in 2007 provisionally titled Beneath the Bleeding.
Val McDermid's standards are high across her portfolio of some 23 titles over a 20 year span, but Mermaids is probably regarded as one of her very best, and as the owner of 12 of those titles I would immediately place it in the top three alongside A Place of Execution and The Torment of Others. She has that rare talent for writing in a `gender neutral' style, by which I mean that her own gender never seems to display itself and potentially alienate one sector or another of her target audience. We should be proud that she is British (if not English!) because few of the crime fiction superstars of the current era are from this side of the pond. Be in no doubt, just in case you haven't read one of Val's books yet - she's right up at the top with the best.
Incidentally, the title The Mermaids Singing is a small extract from a poem written in 1917 by T S Eliot, called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
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