McDermid, Val: The Torment of Others
Derek Tyler has been in a mental institution for two years, locked away after confessing to a string of savage crimes, the ritual mutilation and murder of four prostitutes. Derek's not a bright guy, but his crimes were meticulously planned: the Voice, after all, had given him very precise instructions. Elevated by his acts of sadism, Derek was changed from one of life's losers to a somebody whose crimes could terrorize a community and stump the police, at least for a while. But two years on, with Derek safely behind the bars of his asylum, it's happening again: prostitutes are being killed in precisely the same way, grisly details that had never been released to the public replicated in a gory reprise of the earlier murders. And the Voice is commanding a new killer.
While Tony Hill tries to enter the mind of the maniac cleaning up Bradfield's red-light district, the city's police department, under the leadership of DCI Carol Jordan, investigates the crime by more traditional means--poring through paperwork, interrogating everyone working and living in the seedy area in which the crimes took place, and planting an undercover policewoman among the city's vulnerable working girls.
Val McDermid's The Torment of Others, the fourth book in her series featuring profiler Tony Hill, is a solid police procedural and simply a very good read: well-written, with likeable but flawed good guys, creepy bad guys, and a plot that will keep you guessing until Tony himself starts putting the pieces together. And once he does that, some 60 pages from the book's close, readers will be hard pressed indeed to put this one down.
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