Killing the Shadows

Our cultures obsession with serial killers as its own dark shadow sometimes obscures the fact that people kill for other reasons than sex. In Killing the Shadows Val McDermids new detective, academic psychologist Fiona Cameron, has become something of a maverick because of her insistence on using other sorts of profiling as well as the standard psycho-sexual ones; she ha Our cultures obsession with serial killers as its own dark shadow sometimes obscures the fact that people kill for other reasons than sex. In Killing the Shadows Val McDermids new detective, academic psychologist Fiona Cameron, has become something of a maverick because of her insistence on using other sorts of profiling as well as the standard psycho-sexual ones; she has refused to work for the Metropolitan police any more because of a murder they failed to solve because they took another psychologists advice. Yet the woman murdered on Hampstead Heath preys on her conscience, along with her own murdered sister, as she works for the Spanish police on a killer who decorates the sights of Toledo with dead tourists. And then someone starts killing crime writers and Fionas lover Kit is on the killers list. Val McDermids ingenuity and solid sense of how crime and investigation works have made her one of the dominant figures in contemporary British crime writing. Killing the Shadows is one of her best books yet, both for its powerful critique of modern policing and for the serious questions it asks about our fascination with the deadliest of criminals. — Roz Kaveney